{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_25535/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_25535","id":"gutenberg_25535","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25535","summary":null,"tags":["Category: British Literature","Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Plays/Films/Dramas","Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592 -- Influence","Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Philosophy","Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Sources"],"text":"Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Turgut Dincer and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This\nfile was produced from images generously made available\nby The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)\n\n\n\n\n\n+-----------------------------------------+\n| Transcribers note: Old spellings of the |\n| words have been retained as well as the |\n| doubtful use of colons instead of       |\n| semicolons in many places for the sake  |\n| of fidelity to the original text.       |\n+-----------------------------------------+\n\n\n\n\nMONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE\n\nBY\n\nJOHN M. ROBERTSON\n\nLONDON\nTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED\n16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C.\n1897\n\n\nTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS\n\nMONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE\n\n\nFor a good many years past the anatomic study of Shakspere, of which a\nrevival seems now on foot, has been somewhat out of fashion, as compared\nwith its vogue in the palmy days of the New Shakspere Society in\nEngland, and the years of the battle between the iconoclasts and the\nworshippers in Germany. When Mr. Fleay and Mr. Spedding were hard at\nwork on the metrical tests; when Mr. Spedding was subtly undoing the\nchronological psychology of Dr. Furnivall; when the latter student was\non his part undoing in quite another style some of the judgments of Mr.\nSwinburne; and when Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps was with natural wrath\ncalling on Mr. Browning, as President of the Society, to keep Dr.\nFurnivall in order, we (then) younger onlookers felt that literary\nhistory was verily being made. Our sensations, it seemed, might be as\nthose of our elders had been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and\nthe tragical end thereof. Then came a period of lull in things\nShaksperean, partly to be accounted for by the protrusion of the\nBrowning Society and kindred undertakings. It seemed as if once more men\nhad come to the attitude of 1850, when Mr. Phillipps had written: \"An\nopinion has been gaining ground, and has been encouraged by writers\nwhose judgment is entitled to respectful consideration, that almost if\nnot all the commentary on the works of Shakspere of a necessary and\ndesirable kind has already been given to the world.\"[1] And, indeed, so\nmuch need was there for time to digest the new criticism that it may be\ndoubted whether among the general cultured public the process is even\nnow accomplished.\n\nTo this literary phase in particular, and to our occupation with other\nstudies in general, may be attributed the opportunity which still exists\nfor the discussion of one of the most interesting of all problems\nconcerning Shakspere. Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi--a host\nof peculiarly modern problem-makers have been exorcising our not\ninexhaustible taste for the problematic, so that there was no very\nviolent excitement over even the series of new \"Keys\" to the sonnets\nwhich came forth in the lull of the analysis of the plays; and yet, even\nwith all the problems of modernity in view, it seems as if it must be\nrather by accident of oversight than for lack of interest in new\ndevelopments of Shakspere-study that so little attention has been given\namong us to a question which, once raised, has a very peculiar literary\nand psychological attraction of its own--the subject, namely, of the\ninfluence which the plays show their author to have undergone from the\nEssays of Montaigne.\n\nAs to the bare fact of the influence, there can be little question. That\nShakspere in one scene in the TEMPEST versifies a passage from the prose\nof Florio's translation of Montaigne's chapter OF THE CANNIBALS has been\nrecognised by all the commentators since Capell (1767), who detected the\ntranscript from a reading of the French only, not having compared the\ntranslation. The first thought of students was to connect the passage\nwith Ben Johnson's allusion in VOLPONE[2] to frequent \"stealings from\nMontaigne\" by contemporary writers; and though VOLPONE dates from 1605,\nand the TEMPEST from 1610-1613, there has been no systematic attempt to\napply the clue chronologically. Still, it has been recognised or\nsurmised by a series of writers that the influence of the essayist on\nthe dramatist went further than the passage in question. John Sterling,\nwriting on Montaigne in 1838 (when Sir Frederick Madden's pamphlet on\nthe autograph of Shakspere in a copy of Florio had called special\nattention to the Essays), remarked that \"on the whole, the celebrated\nsoliloquy in HAMLET presents a more characteristic and expressive\nresemblance to much of Montaigne's writings than any other portion of\nthe plays of the great dramatist which we at present remember\"; and\nfurther threw out the germ of a thesis which has since been disastrously\ndeveloped, to the effect that \"the Prince of Denmark is very nearly a\nMontaigne, lifted to a higher eminence, and agitated by more striking\ncircumstances and a severer destiny, and altogether a somewhat more\npassionate structure of man.\"[3] In 1846, again, Philarete Chasles, an\nacute and original critic, citing the passage in the TEMPEST, went on to\ndeclare that \"once on the track of the studies and tastes of Shakspere,\nwe find Montaigne at every corner, in HAMLET, in OTHELLO, in CORIOLANUS.\nEven the composite style of Shakspere, so animated, so vivid, so new, so\nincisive, so coloured, so hardy, offers a multitude of striking\nanalogies to the admirable and free manner of Montaigne.\"[4] The\nsuggestion as to the \"To be or not to be\" soliloquy has been taken up by\nsome critics, but rejected by others; and the propositions of M.\nChasles, so far as I am aware, have never been supported by evidence.\nNevertheless, the general fact of a frequent reproduction or\nmanipulation of Montaigne's ideas in some of Shakspere's later plays\nhas, I think, since been established.\n\nTwelve years ago I incidentally cited, in an essay on the composition of\nHAMLET, some dozen of the Essays of Montaigne from which Shakspere had\napparently received suggestions, and instanced one or two cases in which\nactual peculiarities of phrase in Florio's translation of the Essays are\nadopted by him, in addition to a peculiar coincidence which has been\npointed out by Mr. Jacob Feis in his work entitled SHAKSPERE AND\nMONTAIGNE; and since then the late Mr. Henry Morley, in his edition of\nthe Florio translation, has pointed to a still more remarkable\ncoincidence of phrase, in a passage of HAMLET which I had traced to\nMontaigne without noticing the decisive verbal agreement in question.\nYet so far as I have seen, the matter has passed for little more than a\nliterary curiosity, arousing no new ideas as to Shakspere's mental\ndevelopment. The notable suggestion of Chasles on that head has been\nignored more completely than the theory of Mr. Feis, which in comparison\nis merely fantastic. Either, then, there is an unwillingness in England\nto conceive of Shakspere as owing much to foreign influences, or as a\ncase of intelligible mental growth, or else the whole critical problem\nwhich Shakspere represents--and he may be regarded as the greatest of\ncritical problems--comes within the general disregard for serious\ncriticism, noticeable among us of late years. And the work of Mr. Feis,\nunfortunately, is as a whole so extravagant that it could hardly fail to\nbring a special suspicion on every form of the theory of an intellectual\ntie between Shakspere and Montaigne. Not only does he undertake to show\nin dead earnest what Sterling had vaguely suggested as conceivable, that\nShakspere meant Hamlet to represent Montaigne, but he strenuously argues\nthat the poet framed the play in order to discredit Montaigne's\nopinions--a thesis which almost makes the Bacon theory specious by\ncomparison. Naturally it has made no converts, even in Germany, where,\nas it happens, it had been anticipated.\n\nIn France, however, the neglect of the special problem of Montaigne's\ninfluence on Shakspere is less easily to be explained, seeing how much\nintelligent study has been given of late by French critics to both\nShakspere and Montaigne. The influence is recognised; but here again it\nis only cursorily traced. The latest study of Montaigne is that of M.\nPaul Stapfer, a vigilant critic, whose services to Shakspere-study have\nbeen recognised in both countries. But all that M. Stapfer claims for\nthe influence of the French essayist on the English dramatist is thus\nput:--\n\n  \"Montaigne is perhaps too purely French to have exercised\n  much influence abroad. Nevertheless his influence on England\n  is not to be disdained. Shakspere appreciated him (_le\n  goutait_); he has inserted in the TEMPEST a passage of the\n  chapter DES CANNIBALES; and the strong expressions of the\n  ESSAYS on man, the inconstant, irresolute being, contrary to\n  himself, marvellously vain, various and changeful, were\n  perhaps not unconnected with (_peut etre pas etrangeres a_)\n  the conception of HAMLET. The author of the scene of the\n  grave-diggers must have felt the savour and retained the\n  impression of this thought, humid and cold as the grave:\n  'The heart and the life of a great and triumphant emperor\n  are but the repast of a little worm.' The translation of\n  Plutarch, or rather of Amyot, by Thomas North, and that of\n  Montaigne by Florio, had together a great and long vogue in\n  the English society of the seventeenth century.\"[5]\n\nSo modest a claim, coming from the French side, can hardly be blamed on\nthe score of that very modesty. It is the fact, however, that, though\nM. Stapfer has in another work[6] compared Shakspere with a French\nclassic critically enough, he has here understated his case. He was led\nto such an attitude in his earlier study of Shakspere by the slightness\nof the evidence offered for the claim of M. Chasles, of which he wrote\nthat it is \"a gratuitous supposition, quite unjustified by the few\ntraces in his writings of his having read the Essays.\"[7] But that\nverdict was passed without due scrutiny. The influence of Montaigne on\nShakspere was both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has suggested; and\nit is perhaps more fitting, after all, that the proof should be\nundertaken by some of us who, speaking Shakspere's tongue, cannot well\nbe suspected of seeking to belittle him when we trace the sources for\nhis thought, whether in his life or in his culture. There is still,\nindeed, a tendency among the more primitively patriotic to look\njealously at such inquiries, as tending to diminish the glory of the\nworshipped name; but for anyone who is capable of appreciating\nShakspere's greatness, there can be no question of iconoclasm in the\nmatter. Shakspere ignorantly adored is a mere dubious mystery; Shakspere\nfollowed up and comprehended, step by step, albeit never wholly\nrevealed, becomes more remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as he\nbecomes more intelligible. We are embarked, not on a quest for\nplagiarisms, but on a study of the growth of a wonderful mind. And in\nthe idea that much of the growth is traceable to the fertilising contact\nof a foreign intelligence there can be nothing but interest and\nattraction for those who have mastered the primary sociological truth\nthat such contacts of cultures are the very life of civilisation.\n\n\n\n\nII.\n\n\nThe first requirement in the study, obviously, is an exact statement of\nthe coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. Not\nthat such coincidences are the main or the only results to be looked\nfor; rather we may reasonably expect to find Shakspere's thought often\ndiverging at a tangent from that of the writer he is reading, or even\ndirectly gainsaying it. But there can be no solid argument as to such\nindirect influence until we have fully established the direct influence,\nand this can only be done by exhibiting a considerable number of\ncoincidences. M. Chasles, while avowing that \"the comparison of texts is\nindispensable--we must undergo this fatigue in order to know to what\nextent Shakspere, between 1603 and 1615, became familiar with\nMontaigne\"--strangely enough made no comparison of texts whatever beyond\nreproducing the familiar paraphrase in the TEMPEST, from the essay OF\nCANNIBALS; and left absolutely unsupported his assertion as to HAMLET,\nOTHELLO, and CORIOLANUS. It is necessary to produce proofs, and to look\nnarrowly to dates. Florio's translation, though licensed in 1601, was\nnot published till 1603, the year of the piratical publication of the\nFirst Quarto of HAMLET, in which the play lacks much of its present\nmatter, and shows in many parts so little trace of Shakspere's spirit\nand versification that, even if we hold the text to have been\nimperfectly taken down in shorthand, as it no doubt was, we cannot\nsuppose him to have at this stage completed his refashioning of the\nolder play, which is undoubtedly the substratum of his.[8] We must\ntherefore keep closely in view the divergencies between this text and\nthat of the Second Quarto, printed in 1604, in which the transmuting\ntouch of Shakspere is broadly evident. It is quite possible that\nShakspere may have seen parts of Florio's translation before 1603, or\nheard passages from it read; or even that he might have read Montaigne\nin the original. But as his possession of the translation is made\ncertain by the preservation of the copy bearing his autograph, and as it\nis from Florio that he is seen to have copied in the passages where his\ncopying is beyond dispute, it is on Florio's translation that we must\nproceed.\n\n\nI. In order to keep all the evidence in view, we may first of all\ncollate once more the passage in the TEMPEST with that in the Essays\nwhich it unquestionably follows. In Florio's translation, Montaigne's\nwords run:\n\n  \"They [Lycurgus and Plato] could not imagine a genuity so\n  pure and simple, as we see it by experience, nor ever\n  believe our society might be maintained with so little art\n  and human combination. It is a nation (would I answer Plato)\n  that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no\n  intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of\n  politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of\n  poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no\n  occupations, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no\n  apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine,\n  corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood,\n  treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and\n  passion, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant\n  would he find his imaginary commonwealth from this\n  perfection?\"\n\nCompare the speech in which the kind old Gonzalo seeks to divert the\ntroubled mind of the shipwrecked King Alonso:\n\n \"I' the commonwealth I would by contraries\n  Execute all things: for no kind of traffic\n  Would I admit; no name of magistrate;\n  Letters should not be known; no use of service,\n  Of riches, or of poverty; no contracts,\n  Succession; bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:\n  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:\n  No occupation, all men idle, all;\n  And women too: but innocent and pure:\n  No sovereignty....\"\n\nThere can be no dispute as to the direct transcription here, where the\ndramatist is but incidentally playing with Montaigne's idea, proceeding\nto put some gibes at it in the mouths of Gonzalo's rascally comrades;\nand it follows that Gonzalo's further phrase, \"to excel the golden age,\"\nproceeds from Montaigne's previous words: \"exceed all the pictures\nwherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the golden age.\" The\nplay was in all probability written in or before 1610. It remains to\nshow that on his first reading of Florio's Montaigne, in 1603-4,\nShakspere was more deeply and widely influenced, though the specific\nproofs are in the nature of the case less palpable.\n\n\nII. Let us take first the more decisive coincidences of phrase.\nCorrespondences of thought which in themselves do not establish their\ndirect connection, have a new significance when it is seen that other\ncoincidences amount to manifest reproduction. And such a coincidence we\nhave, to begin with, in the familiar lines:\n\n  \"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,\n   Rough-hew them how we will.\"[9]\n\nI pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which does not occur in the\nFirst Quarto HAMLET, corresponds very closely with the theme of\nMontaigne's essay, THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES MET WITHALL IN PURSUIT OF\nREASON,[10] in which occurs the phrase, \"Fortune has more judgment[11]\nthan we,\" a translation from Menander. But Professor Morley, having had\nhis attention called to the subject by the work of Mr. Feis, who had\nsuggested another passage as the source of Shakspere's, made a more\nperfect identification. Reading the proofs of the Florio translation for\nhis reprint, he found, what I had not observed in my occasional access\nto the old folio, not then reprinted, that the very metaphor of\n\"rough-hewing\" occurs in Florio's rendering of a passage in the\nEssays:--[12] \"My consultation doth somewhat roughly hew the matter, and\nby its first shew lightly consider the same: the main and chief point of\nthe work I am wont to resign to Heaven.\" This is a much more exact\ncoincidence than is presented in the passage cited by Mr. Feis from the\nessay OF PHYSIOGNOMY:--[13] \"Therefore do our designs so often\nmiscarry.... The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the\nextension and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdom, to the\nprejudice of theirs, and abridge them so much more unto us by so much\nmore we endeavour to amplify them.\" If there were no closer parallel\nthan that in Montaigne, we should be bound to take it as an expansion of\na phrase in Seneca's AGAMEMNON,[14] which was likely to have become\nproverbial. I may add that the thought is often repeated in the Essays,\nand that in several passages it compares notably with Shakspere's lines.\nThese begin:\n\n                                    \"Rashly,\n  --And praised be rashness for it--Let us know\n  Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well\n  When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us\n  There's a divinity\" etc.\n\nCompare the following extracts from Florio's translation:--\n\n  \"The _Daemon_ of Socrates were peradventure a certain\n  impulsion or will which without the advice of his discourse\n  presented itself unto him. In a mind so well purified, and\n  by continual exercise of wisdom and virtue so well prepared\n  as his was, it is likely his inclinations (though rash and\n  inconsiderate) were ever of great moment, and worthy to be\n  followed. Every man feeleth in himself some image of such\n  agitations, of a prompt, vehement, and casual opinion. It is\n  in me to give them some authority, that afford so little to\n  our wisdom. And I have had some (equally weak in reason and\n  violent in persuasion and dissuasion, which was more\n  ordinary to Socrates) by which I have so happily and so\n  profitably suffered myself to be transported, as they might\n  perhaps be thought to contain some matter of divine\n  inspiration.\"[15]\n\n  \"Even in our counsels and deliberations, some chance or good\n  luck must needs be joined to them; for whatsoever our\n  wisdom can effect is no great matter.\"[16]\n\n  \"When I consider the most glorious exploits of war, methinks\n  I see that those who have had the conduct of them employ\n  neither counsel nor deliberation about them, but for fashion\n  sake, and leave the best part of the enterprise to fortune;\n  and on the confidence they have in her aid, they still go\n  beyond the limits of all discourse. Casual rejoicings and\n  strange furies ensue among their deliberations.\"[17] etc.\n\nCompare finally Florio's translation of the lines of Manilius cited by\nMontaigne at the end of the 47th Essay of the First Book:\n\n  \"'Tis best for ill-advis'd, wisdom may fail,[18]\n  Fortune proves not the cause that should prevail,\n  But here and there without respect doth sail:\n  A higher power forsooth us overdraws,\n  And mortal states guides with immortal laws.\"\n\nIt is to be remembered, indeed, that the idea expressed in Hamlet's\nwords to Horatio is partly anticipated in the rhymed speech of the\nPlayer-King in the play-scene in Act III., which occurs in the First\nQuarto:\n\n \"Our wills, our fates do so contrary run\n  That our devices still are overthrown;\n  Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.\"\n\nSuch a passage, reiterating a familiar commonplace, might seem at first\nsight to tell against the view that Hamlet's later speech to Horatio is\nan echo of Montaigne. But that view being found justified by the\nevidence, and the idea in that passage being exactly coincident with\nMontaigne's, while the above lines are only partially parallel in\nmeaning, we are forced to admit that Shakspere may have been influenced\nby Montaigne even where a partial precedent might be found in his own or\nother English work.\n\n\nIII. The phrase \"discourse of reason,\" which is spoken by Hamlet in his\nfirst soliloquy,[19] and which first appears in the Second Quarto, is\nnot used by Shakspere in any play before HAMLET; and he uses it again in\nTROILUS AND CRESSIDA;[20] while \"discourse of thought\" appears in\nOTHELLO;[21] and \"discourse,\" in the sense of reasoning faculty, is used\nin Hamlet's last soliloquy.[22] In English literature this use of the\nword seems to be special in Shakspere's period,[23] and it has been\nnoted by an admirer as a finely Shaksperean expression. But the\nexpression \"discourse of reason\" occurs at least four times in\nMontaigne's Essays, and in Florio's translation of them: in the\nessay[24] THAT TO PHILOSOPHISE IS TO LEARN HOW TO DIE; again at the\nclose of the essay[25] _A demain les affaires_; again in the first\nparagraph of the APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE[26]; and yet again in the\nchapter on THE HISTORY OF SPURINA;[27] and though it seems to be\nscholastic in origin, and occurs once or twice before 1600 in English\nbooks, it is difficult to doubt that, like the other phrase above cited,\nit came to Shakspere through Florio's Montaigne. The word _discours_ is\na hundred times used singly by Montaigne, as by Shakspere in the phrase\n\"of such large discourse,\" for the process of ratiocination.\n\n\nIV. Then again there is the clue of Shakspere's use of the word\n\"consummation\" in the revised form of the \"To be\" soliloquy. This, as\nMr. Feis pointed out,[28] is the word used by Florio as a rendering of\n_aneantissement_ in the speech of Socrates as given by Montaigne in the\nessay[29] OF PHYSIOGNOMY. Shakspere makes Hamlet speak of annihilation\nas \"a consummation devoutly to be wished.\" Florio has: \"If it (death) be\na consummation of one's being, it is also an amendment and entrance into\na long and quiet night. We find nothing so sweet in life as a quiet and\ngentle sleep, and without dreams.\" Here not only do the words coincide\nin a peculiar way, but the idea in the two phrases is the same; the\ntheme of sleep and dreams being further common to the two writings.\n\nBeyond these, I have not noted any correspondences of phrase so precise\nas to prove reminiscence beyond possibility of dispute; but it is not\ndifficult to trace striking correspondences which, though falling short\nof explicit reproduction, inevitably suggest a relation; and these it\nnow behoves us to consider. The remarkable thing is, as regards HAMLET,\nthat they almost all occur in passages not present in the First Quarto.\n\n\nV. When we compare part of the speech of Rosencrantz on sedition[30]\nwith a passage in Montaigne's essay, OF CUSTOM,[31] we find a somewhat\nclose coincidence. In the play Rosencrantz says:\n\n                  \"The cease of Majesty,\n  Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw\n  What's near with it: it is a massy wheel\n  Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,\n  To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things\n  Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls,\n  Each small annexment, petty consequence,\n  Attends the boisterous ruin.\"\n\nFlorio has:\n\n  \"Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly the first\n  overthrown by the fall of it.... The contexture and\n  combining of this monarchy and great building having been\n  dismissed and dissolved by it, namely, in her old years,\n  giveth as much overture and entrance as a man will to like\n  injuries. Royal _majesty_ doth more hardly fall from the top\n  to the middle, than it tumbleth down from the middle to the\n  bottom.\"\n\nThe verbal correspondence here is only less decisive--as regards the use\nof the word \"majesty\"--than in the passages collated by Mr. Morley;\nwhile the thought corresponds as closely.\n\n\nVI. The speech of Hamlet,[32] \"There is nothing either good or bad but\nthinking makes it so\"; and Iago's \"'tis in ourselves that we are thus or\nthus,\"[33] are expressions of a favourite thesis of Montaigne's, to\nwhich he devotes an entire essay.[34] The Shaksperean phrases echo\nclosely such sentences as:--\n\n  \"If that which we call evil and torment be neither torment\n  nor evil, but that our fancy only gives it that quality, it\n  is in us to change it.... That which we term evil is not so\n  of itself.\" ... \"Every man is either well or ill according as\n  he finds himself.\"\n\nAnd in the essay[35] OF DEMOCRITUS AND HERACLITUS there is another close\nparallel:--\n\n  \"Therefore let us take no more excuses from external\n  qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves\n  account of it. Our good and our evil hath no dependency but\n  from ourselves.\"\n\n\nVII. Hamlet's apostrophe to his mother on\nthe power of custom--a passage which, like the\nothers above cited, first appears in the Second\nQuarto--is similarly an echo of a favourite\nproposition of Montaigne, who devotes to it the\nessay[36] OF CUSTOM, AND NOT TO CHANGE READILY A\nRECEIVED LAW. In that there occur the typical\npassages:--\n\n  \"Custom doth so blear us that we cannot distinguish the\n  usage of things.... Certes, chastity is an excellent virtue,\n  the commodity whereof is very well known; but to use it, and\n  according to nature to prevail with it, is as hard as it is\n  easy to endear it and to prevail with it according to\n  custom, to laws and precepts.\" \"The laws of conscience,\n  which we say are born of nature, are born of custom.\"\n\nAgain, in the essay OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL[37] we have: \"Custom is a\nsecond nature, and not less potent.\"\n\nHamlet's words are:--\n\n \"That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat\n  Of habits devil, is angel yet in this\n  That to the use of actions fair and good\n  He likewise gives a frock or livery\n  That aptly is put on....\n  For use can almost change the stamp of nature.\"\n\nNo doubt the idea is a classic commonplace; and in the early TWO\nGENTLEMEN OF VERONA[38] we actually have the line, \"How use doth breed a\nhabit in a man;\" but here again there seems reason to regard Montaigne\nas having suggested Shakspere's vivid and many-coloured wording of the\nidea in the tragedy. Indeed, even the line cited from the early comedy\nmay have been one of the poet's many later additions to his text.\n\n\nVIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance is that between\nthe passage in which Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern\nthe veering of his mood from joy in things to disgust with them, and the\nparagraph in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE in which Montaigne sets\nagainst each other the splendour of the universe and the littleness of\nman. Here the thought diverges, Shakspere making it his own as he always\ndoes, and altering its aim; but the language is curiously similar.\nHamlet says:\n\n  \"It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly\n  frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory: this\n  most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave\n  o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with\n  golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul\n  and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work\n  is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in\n  form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how\n  like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God! the beauty\n  of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is\n  this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.\"\n\nMontaigne, as translated by Florio, has:\n\n  \"Let us see what hold-fast or free-hold he (man) hath in\n  this gorgeous and goodly equipage.... Who hath persuaded\n  him, that this admirable moving of heaven's vaults, that the\n  eternal light of these lamps so fiercely rolling over his\n  head ... were established ... for his commodity and service?\n  Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this\n  miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as\n  master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all\n  things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor of\n  this universe?... [To consider ... the power and domination\n  these (celestial) bodies have, not only upon our lives and\n  conditions of our fortune ... but also over our dispositions\n  and inclinations, our discourses and wills, which they rule,\n  provoke, and move at the pleasure of their influences.] ...\n  Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and\n  therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth\n  himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world\n  ... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the\n  circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is\n  through the vanity of the same imagination that he dare\n  equal himself to God.\"\n\nThe passage in brackets is left here in its place, not as suggesting\nanything in Hamlet's speech, but as paralleling a line in MEASURE FOR\nMEASURE, to be dealt with immediately. But it will be seen that\nthe rest of the passage, though turned to quite another purpose than\nHamlet's, brings together in the same way a set of contrasted ideas of\nhuman greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight\nfirmament.[39]\n\n\nIX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the\nnational vice of drunkenness,[40] of which all save the beginning is\nadded in the Second Quarto just before the entrance of the Ghost, has\nseveral curious points of coincidence with Montaigne's essay[41] on THE\nHISTORY OF SPURINA, which discusses at great length a matter of special\ninterest to Shakspere--the character of Julius Caesar. In the course of\nthe examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the\nepithet \"drunkard\" to Caesar could not have been meant literally; that\nthe same Cato admitted Caesar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is\nafter making light of Caesar's faults in other matters of personal\nconduct that the essayist comes to this decision:\n\n  \"But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy\n  qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this\n  furious passion of ambition.... To conclude, this only vice\n  (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest\n  natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made\n  his memory abominable to all honest minds.\"\n\nCompare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so congruous in their excited\nrapidity with Hamlet's intensity of expectation, which follow on his\nnotable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:\n\n \"So oft it chances in particular men,\n  That for some vicious mode of nature in them,\n  As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,\n  Since nature cannot choose its origin),\n  By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,\n  Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason;\n  Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens\n  The form of plausive manners; that these men,--\n  Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect;\n  Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,--\n  Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,\n  As infinite as man may undergo)\n  Shall in the general censure take corruption\n  From that particular fault....\"\n\nEven the idea that \"nature cannot choose its origin\" is suggested by the\ncontext in Montaigne.[42] Shakspere's estimate of Caesar, of course,\ndiverged from that of the essay.\n\n\nX. I find a certain singularity of coincidence between the words of King\nClaudius on kingship:\n\n \"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,\n  That treason can but peep to what it would,\n  Acts little of his will,\"\n\nand a passage in the essay[43] OF THE INCOMMODITY OF GREATNESS:\n\n  \"To be a king, is a matter of that consequence, that only by\n  it he is so. That strange glimmering and eye-dazzling light,\n  which round about environeth, over-casteth and hideth from\n  us: our weak sight is thereby bleared and dissipated, as\n  being filled and obscured by that greater and\n  further-spreading brightness.\"\n\nThe working out of the metaphor here gives at once to Shakspere's terms\n\"divinity\" and \"can but peep\" a point not otherwise easily seen; but the\nidea of a dazzling light may be really what was meant in the play; and\none is tempted to pronounce the passage a reminiscence of Montaigne.\nHere, however, it has to be noted that in the First Quarto we have the\nlines:\n\n \"There's such divinity doth wall a king\n  That treason dares not look on.\"\n\nAnd if Shakspere had not seen or heard the passage in Montaigne before\nthe publication of Florio's folio--which, however, he may very well have\ndone--the theory of reminiscence here cannot stand.\n\n\nXI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of the army of Fortinbras--one\nof the many passages added in the Second Quarto--there is a strong\ngeneral resemblance to a passage in the essay OF DIVERSION.[44] Hamlet\nfirst remarks to the Captain:\n\n \"Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats\n  Will not debate the question of this straw:\n  This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace;\"\n\nand afterwards soliloquises:\n\n            \"Examples gross as earth exhort me:\n  Witness, this army of such mass and charge,\n  Led by a delicate and tender prince,\n  Whose spirit, by divine ambition puff'd,\n  Makes mouths at the invisible event;\n  Exposing what is mortal and unsure\n  To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,\n  Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great,\n  Is not to stir without great argument,\n  But greatly to find quarrel in a straw.\n  When honour is at stake....\n\n                 ....to my shame I see\n  The imminent death of twenty thousand men,\n  That for a fantasy and trick of fame,\n  Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot\n  Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause....\"\n\nMontaigne has the same general idea in the essay OF DIVERSION:\n\n  \"If one demand that fellow, what interest he hath in such a\n  siege: The interest of example (he will say) and common\n  obedience of the Prince: I nor look nor pretend any benefit\n  thereby ... I have neither passion nor quarrel in the\n  matter. Yet the next day you will see him all changed, and\n  chafing, boiling and blushing with rage, in his rank of\n  battle, ready for the assault. It is the glaring reflecting\n  of so much steel, the flashing thundering of the cannon, the\n  clang of trumpets, and the rattling of drums, that have\n  infused this new fury and rancour in his swelling veins. A\n  frivolous cause, will you say? How a cause? There needeth\n  none to excite our mind. A doting humour without body,\n  without substance, overswayeth it up and down.\"\n\nThe thought recurs in the essay, OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL.[45]\n\n  \"Our greatest agitations have strange springs and ridiculous\n  causes. What ruin did our last Duke of Burgundy run into,\n  for the quarrel of a cart-load of sheep-skins?... See why\n  that man doth hazard both his honour and life on the fortune\n  of his rapier and dagger; let him tell you whence the cause\n  of that confusion ariseth, he cannot without blushing; so\n  vain and frivolous is the occasion.\"\n\nAnd the idea in Hamlet's lines \"rightly to be great,\" etc., is suggested\nin the essay OF REPENTING,[46] where we have:\n\n  \"The nearest way to come unto glory were to do that for\n  conscience which we do for glory.... The worth of the mind\n  consisteth not in going high, but in going orderly. Her\n  greatness is not exercised in greatness; in mediocrity it\n  is.\"\n\nIn the essay OF EXPERIENCE[47] there is a sentence partially expressing\nthe same thought, which is cited by Mr. Feis as a reproduction:\n\n  \"The greatness of the mind is not so much to draw up, and\n  hale forward, as to know how to range, direct, and\n  circumscribe itself. It holdeth for great what is\n  sufficient, and sheweth her height in loving mean things\n  better than eminent.\"\n\nHere, certainly, as in the previous citation, the idea is not identical\nwith that expressed by Hamlet. But the elements he combines are there;\nand again, in the essay OF SOLITARINESS[48] we have the picture of the\nsoldier fighting furiously for the quarrel of his careless king, with\nthe question: \"Who doth not willingly chop and counter-change his\nhealth, his ease, yea his life, for glory and reputation, the most\nunprofitable, vain, and counterfeit coin that is in use with us.\"\n\nAnd yet again the thought crops up in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:\n\n  \"This horror-causing array of so many thousands of armed\n  men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted courage,\n  it would make one laugh to see on how many vain occasions it\n  is raised and set on fire.... The hatred of one man, a\n  spite, a pleasure ... causes which ought not to move two\n  scolding fishwives to catch one another, is the soul and\n  motive of all this hurly-burly.\"\n\n\nXII. Yet one more of Hamlet's sayings peculiar to the revised form of\nthe play seems to be an echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the outset\nof the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet says:--\n\n                   \"What is a man\n  If his chief good and market of his time,\n  Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.\n  Sure He that made us with such large discourse,\n  Looking before and after, gave us not\n  That capability and godlike reason\n  To fust in us unused.\"\n\nThe bearing of the thought in the soliloquy, where Hamlet spasmodically\napplies it to the stimulation of his vengeance, is certainly never given\nto it by Montaigne, who has left on record[49] his small approbation of\nrevenge; but the thought itself is there, in the essay[50] ON GOODS AND\nEVILS.\n\n  \"Shall we employ the intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon\n  us for our greatest good, to our ruin, repugning nature's\n  design and the universal order and vicissitude of things,\n  which implieth that every man should use his instrument and\n  means for his own commodity?\"\n\nAgain, there is a passage in the essay OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO\nTHEIR CHILDREN,[51] where there occurs a specific coincidence of phrase,\nthe special use of the term \"discourse,\" which we have already traced\nfrom Shakspere to Montaigne; and where at the same time the contrast\nbetween man and beast is drawn, though not to the same purpose as in the\nspeech of Hamlet:--\n\n  \"Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some capacity of\n  discourse, that as beasts we should not servilely be\n  subjected to common laws, but rather with judgment and\n  voluntary liberty apply ourselves unto them, we ought\n  somewhat to yield unto the simple authority of Nature, but\n  not suffer her tyrannically to carry us away; only reason\n  ought to have the conduct of our inclinations.\"\n\nFinally we have a third parallel, with a slight coincidence of terms, in\nthe essay[52] OF GIVING THE LIE:\n\n  \"Nature hath endowed us with a large faculty to entertain\n  ourselves apart, and often calleth us unto it, to teach us\n  that partly we owe ourselves unto society, but in the better\n  part unto ourselves.\"\n\nIt may be argued that these, like one or two of the other sayings above\ncited as echoed by Shakspere from Montaigne, are of the nature of\ngeneral religious or ethical maxims, traceable to no one source; and if\nwe only found one or two such parallels, their resemblance of course\nwould have no evidential value, save as regards coincidence of terms.\nFor this very passage, for instance, there is a classic original, or at\nleast a familiar source, in Cicero,[53] where the commonplace of the\ncontrast between man and beast is drawn in terms that come in a general\nway pretty close to Hamlet's. This treatise of Cicero was available to\nShakspere in several English translations;[54] and only the fact that we\nfind no general trace of Cicero in the play entitles us to suggest a\nconnection in this special case with Montaigne, of whom we do find so\nmany other traces. It is easy besides to push the theory of any\ninfluence too far; and when for instance we find Hamlet saying he fares\n\"Of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed,\" it would be\nas idle to assume a reminiscence of a passage of Montaigne on the\nchameleon[55] as it would be to derive Hamlet's phrase \"A king of shreds\nand patches\" from Florio's rendering in the essay[56] OF THE INCONSTANCY\nOF OUR ACTIONS:\n\n  \"We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so\n  shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every piece and\n  every moment playeth his part.\"\n\nIn the latter case we have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a\nproverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of\nresemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that\nShakspere's contemporaries knew Hamlet's use of his tablets to be a\nparody of the \"much-scribbling Montaigne,\" who had avowed that he made\nmuch use of his; the assertion that Ophelia's \"Come, my coach!\" has\nreference to Montaigne's remark that he has known ladies who would\nrather lend their honour than their coach; and a dozen other\npropositions, if possible still more amazing. But when, with no\nforegone conclusion as to any polemic purpose on Shakspere's part, we\nrestrict ourselves to real parallels of thought and expression; when we\nfind that a certain number of these are actually textual; when we find\nfurther that in a single soliloquy in the play there are several\nreproductions of ideas in the essays, some of them frequently recurring\nin Montaigne; and when finally it is found that, with only one\nexception, all the passages in question have been added to the play in\nthe Second Quarto, after the publication of Florio's translation, it\nseems hardly possible to doubt that the translation influenced the\ndramatist in his work.\n\nNeedless to say, the influence is from the very start of that high sort\nin which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives,\nShakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own\nassimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of\nsurface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even\nthe vibration of the style passing from one intelligence to the other;\nthe nervous and copious speech of Montaigne awakening Shakspere to a\nnew sense of power over rhythm and poignant phrase, at the same time\nthat the stimulus of the thought gives him a new confidence in the\nvalidity of his own reflection. Some cause there must have been for this\nmarked species of development in the dramatist at that particular time:\nand if we find pervading signs of one remarkable new influence, with no\ncountervailing evidence of another adequate to the effect, the inference\nis about as reasonable as many which pass for valid in astronomy. For it\nwill be found, on the one hand, that there is no sign worth considering\nof a Montaigne influence on Shakspere before HAMLET; and, on the other\nhand, that the influence to some extent continues beyond that play.\nIndeed, there are still further minute signs of it there, which should\nbe noted before we pass on.\n\n\nXIII. Among parallelisms of thought of a less direct kind, one may be\ntraced between an utterance of Hamlet's and a number of Montaigne's\nsayings on the power of imagination and the possible equivalence of\ndream life and waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosencrantz and\nGuildenstern, where we have already noted an echo of Montaigne, Hamlet\ncries:\n\n  \"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a\n  king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams;\"\n\nand Guildenstern answers:\n\n  \"Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance\n  of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.\"\n\nThe first sentence may be compared with a number in Montaigne,[58] of\nwhich the following[59] is a type:\n\n  \"Man clean contrary [to the Gods] possesseth goods in\n  imagination and evils essentially. We have had reason to\n  make the powers of our imagination to be of force, for all\n  our felicities are but in conceipt, and as it were in a\n  dream;\"\n\nwhile the reply of Guildenstern further recalls several of the passages\nalready cited.\n\n\nXIV. Another apparent parallel of no great importance, but of more\nverbal closeness, is that between Hamlet's jeering phrase:[60] \"Your\nworm is your only emperor for diet,\" and a sentence in the APOLOGY: \"The\nheart and the life of a great and triumphant emperor are the dinner of a\nlittle worm,\" which M. Stapfer compares further with the talk of Hamlet\nin the grave-diggers' scene. Here, doubtless, we are near the level of\nproverbial sayings, current in all countries.\n\n\nXV. As regards HAMLET, I can find no further parallelisms so direct as\nany of the foregoing, except some to be considered later, in connection\nwith the \"To be\" soliloquy. I do not think it can be made out that, as\nM. Chasles affirmed, Hamlet's words on his friendship for Horatio can be\ntraced directly to any of Montaigne's passages on that theme. \"It would\nbe easy,\" says M. Chasles, \"to show in Shakspere the _branloire\nperenne_[61] of Montaigne, and the whole magnificent passage on\nfriendship, which is found reproduced (_se trouve reporte_) in HAMLET.\"\nThe idea of the world as a perpetual mutation is certainly prevalent in\nShakspere's work; but I can find no exact correspondence of phrase\nbetween Montaigne's pages on his love for his dead friend Etienne de la\nBoetie and the lines in which Hamlet speaks of his love for Horatio. He\nrather gives his reasons for his love than describes the nature and\ncompleteness of it in Montaigne's way; and as regards the description\nof Horatio, it could have been independently suggested by such a\ntreatise as Seneca's DE CONSTANTIA SAPIENTIS, which is a monody on the\ntheme with which it closes: _esse aliquem invictum, esse aliquem in quem\nnihil fortuna possit_--\"to be something unconquered, something against\nwhich fortune is powerless.\" In the fifth section the idea is worded in\na fashion that could have suggested Shakspere's utterance of it; and he\nmight easily have met with some citation of the kind. But, on the other\nhand, this note of passionate friendship is not only new in Shakspere\nbut new in HAMLET, in respect of the First Quarto, in which the main\npart of the speech to Horatio does not occur, and in view of the\nsingular fact that in the first Act of the play as it stands Hamlet\ngreets Horatio as a mere acquaintance; and it is further to be noted\nthat the description of Horatio as \"one in suffering all that suffers\nnothing\" is broadly suggested by the quotation from Horace in\nMontaigne's nineteenth chapter (which, as we have already seen,\nimpressed Shakspere), and by various other sayings in the Essays. After\nthe quotation from Horace (_Non vultus instantis tyranni_), in the\nNineteenth Essay, Florio's translation runs:\n\n  \"She (the soul) is made mistress of her passions and\n  concupiscences, lady of indigence, of shame, of poverty, and\n  of all fortune's injuries. Let him that can, attain to this\n  advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign liberty,\n  that affords us means wherewith to jest and make a scorn of\n  force and injustice, and to deride imprisonment, gyves, or\n  fetters.\"\n\nAgain, in the essay OF THREE COMMERCES OR SOCIETIES,[62] we have this:\n\n  \"We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and\n  dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply\n  ourselves to diverse fashions. It is a being, but not a\n  life, to be tied and bound by necessity to one only course.\n  The goodliest minds are those that have most variety and\n  pliableness in them.... Life is a motion unequal, irregular,\n  and multiform....\n\n  \" ... My fortune having inured and allured me, even from my\n  infancy, to one sole, singular, and perfect amity, hath\n  verily in some sort distasted me from others.... So that it\n  is naturally a pain unto me to communicate myself by halves,\n  and with modification....\n\n  \"I should commend a high-raised mind that could both bend\n  and discharge itself; that wherever her fortune might\n  transport her, she might continue constant.... I envy those\n  which can be familiar with the meanest of their followers,\n  and vouchsafe to contract friendship and frame discourse\n  with their own servants.\"\n\nAgain, la Boetie is panegyrised by Montaigne for his rare poise and\nfirmness of character;[63] and elsewhere in the essays we find many\nallusions to the ideal of the imperturbable man, which Montaigne has in\nthe above cited passages brought into connection with his ideal of\nfriendship. It could well be, then--though here we cannot argue the\npoint with confidence--that in this as in other matters the strong\ngeneral impression that Montaigne was so well fitted to make on\nShakspere's mind was the source of such a change in the conception and\nexposition of Hamlet's relation to Horatio as is set up by Hamlet's\nprotestation of his long-standing admiration and love for his friend.\nShakspere's own relations with one or other of his noble patrons would\nmake him specially alive to such suggestion.\n\n\nXVI. We now come to the suggested resemblance between the \"To be or not\nto be\" soliloquy and the general tone of Montaigne on the subject of\ndeath. On this resemblance I am less disposed to lay stress now than I\nwas on a first consideration of the subject thirteen years ago. While I\nfind new coincidences of detail on a more systematic search, I am less\nimpressed by the alleged general resemblance of tone. In point of fact,\nthe general drift of Hamlet's soliloquy is rather alien to the general\ntone of Montaigne on the same theme. That tone, as we shall see,\nharmonises much more nearly with the speech of the Duke to Claudio, on\nthe same theme, in MEASURE FOR MEASURE. What really seems to subsist in\nthe \"To be\" soliloquy, after a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes\nof single thoughts; but there is the difficulty that some of these occur\nin the earlier form of the soliloquy in the First Quarto, a circumstance\nwhich tends--though not necessarily[64]--to throw a shade of doubt on\nthe apparent echoes in the finished form of the speech. We can but weigh\nthe facts as impartially as may be.\n\nFirst, there is the striking coincidence of the word \"consummation\"\n(which appears only in the Second Quarto), with Florio's translation of\n_aneantissement_ in the essay OF PHYSIOGNOMY, as above noted. Secondly,\nthere is a curious resemblance between the phrase \"take arms against a\nsea of troubles\" and a passage in Florio's version of the same essay,\nwhich has somehow been overlooked in the disputes over Shakspere's line.\nIt runs:\n\n  \"I sometimes suffer myself by starts to be surprised with\n  the pinchings of these unpleasant conceits, which, whilst I\n  arm myself to expel or wrestle against them, assail and beat\n  me. Lo here another huddle or tide of mischief, that on the\n  neck of the former came rushing upon me.\"\n\nThere arises here the difficulty that Shakspere's line had been\nsatisfactorily traced to AElian's[65] story of the Celtic practice of\nrushing into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons; and the matter\nmust, I think, be left open until it can he ascertained whether the\nstatement concerning the Celts was available to Shakspere in any\ntranslation or citation.[66]\n\nAgain, the phrase \"Conscience doth make cowards of us all\" is very like\nthe echo of two passages in the essay[67] OF CONSCIENCE: \"Of such\nmarvellous working power is the sting of conscience: which often\ninduceth us to bewray, to accuse, and to combat ourselves\"; \"which as it\ndoth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it store us with assurance and\ntrust;\" and the lines about \"the dread of something after death\" might\npoint to the passage in the Fortieth Essay, in which Montaigne cites the\nsaying of Augustine that \"Nothing but what follows death, makes death to\nbe evil\" (_malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem_) cited by\nMontaigne in order to dispute it. The same thought, too, is dealt with\nin the essay[68] on A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA, which contains a\npassage suggestive of Hamlet's earlier soliloquy on self-slaughter. But,\nfor one thing, Hamlet's soliloquies are contrary in drift to Montaigne's\nargument; and, for another, the phrase \"Conscience makes cowards of us\nall\" existed in the soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while the\ngist of the idea is actually found twice in a previous play, where it\nhas a proverbial ring.[69] And \"the _hope_ of something after death\"\nfigures in the First Quarto also.\n\nFinally, there are other sources than Montaigne for parts of the\nsoliloquy, sources nearer, too, than those which have been pointed to in\nthe Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. Cunliffe has pointed\nout,[70] a broad correspondence between the whole soliloquy and the\nchorus of women at the end of the second Act of the TROADES, where the\nquestion of a life beyond is pointedly put:\n\n \"Verum est? an timidos fabula decepit,\n  Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?\"\n\nIt is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce definitely against\nthe future life:\n\n \"Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil....\n  Rumores vacui verbaque inania,\n  Et par sollicito fabula somnio.\"\n\nBut wherever in Christendom the pagan's words were discussed, the\nChristian hypothesis would be pitted against his unbelief, with the\neffect of making one thought overlay the other; and in this fused form\nthe discussion may easily have reached Shakspere's eye and ear. So it\nwould be with the echo of two Senecan passages noted by Mr. Munro in the\nverses on \"the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller\nreturns.\" In the HERCULES FURENS[71] we have:\n\n \"Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam\n  Quum semel venit potuit reverti;\"\n\nand in the HERCULES OETAEUS[72] there is the same thought:\n\n               \"regnum canis inquieti\n  Unde non unquam remeavit ullus.\"\n\nBut here, as elsewhere, Seneca himself was employing a standing\nsentiment, for in the best known poem of Catullus we have:\n\n \"Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum\n  Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.\"[73]\n\nAnd though there was in Shakspere's day no English translation of\nCatullus, the commentators long ago noted[74] that in Sandford's\ntranslation of Cornelius Agrippa (? 1569), there occurs the phrase, \"The\ncountrie of the dead is irremeable, that they cannot return,\" a fuller\nparallel to the passage in the soliloquy than anything cited from the\nclassics.\n\nFinally, in Marlowe's EDWARD II.,[75] written before 1593, we have:\n\n               \"Weep not for Mortimer,\n  That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,\n  Goes to discover countries yet unknown.\"[76]\n\nSo that, without going to the Latin, we have obvious English sources for\nnotable parts of the soliloquy.\n\nThus, though Shakspere may (1) have seen part of the Florio translation,\nor separate translations of some of the essays, before the issue of the\nFirst Quarto; or may (2) easily have heard that very point discussed by\nFlorio, who was the friend of his friend Jonson, or by those who had\nread the original; or may even (3) himself have read in the original;\nand though further it seems quite certain that his \"consummation\ndevoutly to be wished\" was an echo of Florio's translation of the\nApology of Socrates; on the other hand we are not entitled to trace the\nsoliloquy as a whole to Montaigne's stimulation of Shakspere's thought.\nThat Shakspere read Montaigne in the original once seemed probable to\nme, as to others; but, on closer study, I consider it unlikely, were it\nonly because the Montaigne influence in his work begins, as aforesaid,\nin HAMLET. Of all the apparent coincidences I have noticed between\nShakspere's previous plays and the essays, none has any evidential\nvalue. (1) The passage on the music of the spheres in the MERCHANT OF\nVENICE[77] recalls the passage on the subject in Montaigne's essay of\nCUSTOM;[78] but then the original source is Cicero, IN SOMNIUM\nSCIPIONIS, which had been translated into English in 1577. (2)\nFalstaff's rhapsody on the virtues of sherris[79] recalls a passage in\nthe essay OF DRUNKENNESS,[80] but then Montaigne avows that what he says\nis the common doctrine of wine-drinkers. (3) Montaigne cites[81] the old\nsaying of Petronius, that \"all the world's a stage,\" which occurs in AS\nYOU LIKE IT; but the phrase itself, being preserved by John of\nSalisbury, would be current in England. It is, indeed, said to have been\nthe motto of the Globe Theatre. Thus, while we are the more strongly\nconvinced of a Montaigne influence beginning with HAMLET, we are bound\nto concede the doubtfulness of any apparent influence before the Second\nQuarto. At most we may say that both of Hamlet's soliloquies which touch\non suicide evidently owe something to the discussions set up by\nMontaigne's essays.[82]\n\n\nXVII. In the case of the Duke's exhortation to Claudio in MEASURE FOR\nMEASURE, on the contrary, the whole speech may be said to be a synthesis\nof favourite propositions of Montaigne. The thought in itself, of\ncourse, is not new or out-of-the-way; it is nearly all to be found\nsuggested in the Latin classics; but in the light of what is certain for\nus as to Shakspere's study of Montaigne, and of the whole cast of the\nexpression, it is difficult to doubt that Montaigne is for Shakspere the\nsource. Let us take a number of passages from Florio's translation of\nthe Nineteenth Essay, to begin with:\n\n  \"The end of our career is death: it is the necessary object\n  of our aim; if it affright us, how is it possible we should\n  step one foot further without an ague?\"\n\n  \"What hath an aged man left him of his youth's vigour, and\n  of his fore past life?... When youth fails in us, we feel,\n  nay we perceive, no shaking or transchange at all in\n  ourselves: which is essence and verity is a harder death\n  than that of a languishing and irksome life, or that of age.\n  Forasmuch as the leap from an ill being into a not being is\n  not so dangerous or steepy as it is from a delightful and\n  flourishing being into a painful and sorrowful condition. A\n  weak bending and faint stopping body hath less strength to\n  bear and undergo a heavy burden: So hath our soul.\"\n\n  \"Our religion hath no surer human foundation than the\n  contempt of life. Discourse of reason doth not only call and\n  summon us unto it. For why should we fear to lose a thing,\n  which being lost, cannot be moaned? But also, since we are\n  threatened by so many kinds of death, there is no more\n  inconvenience to fear them all than to endure one: what\n  matter it when it cometh, since it is unavoidable?... Death\n  is a part of yourselves; you fly from yourselves. The being\n  you enjoy is equally shared between life and death ... The\n  continual work of your life is to contrive death; you are in\n  death during the time you continue in life ... during life\n  you are still dying.\"\n\nThe same line of expostulation occurs in other essays. In the Fortieth\nwe have:\n\n  \"Now death, which some of all horrible things call the most\n  horrible, who knows not how others call it the only haven of\n  this life's torments? the sovereign good of nature? the only\n  stay of our liberty? and the ready and common receipt of our\n  evils?...\n\n  \" ... Death is but felt by discourse, because it is the\n  emotion of an instant. A thousand beasts, a thousand men,\n  are sooner dead than threatened.\"\n\nThen take a passage occurring near the end of the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND\nSEBONDE:\n\n  \"We do foolishly fear a kind of death, whereas we have\n  already passed and daily pass so many others.... The flower\n  of age dieth, fadeth, and fleeteth, when age comes upon us,\n  and youth endeth in the flower of a full-grown man's age,\n  childhood in youth, and the first age dieth in infancy; and\n  yesterday endeth in this day, and to-day shall die in\n  to-morrow.\"\n\nNow compare textually the Duke's speech:\n\n \"Be absolute for death: either death or life\n  Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:--\n  If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing\n  That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,\n  (Servile to all the skiey influences)\n  That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,\n  Hourly afflict: merely, thou are death's fool;\n  For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,\n  And yet run'st towards him still: Thou art not noble;\n  For all the accommodations that thou bear'st\n  Are nursed by baseness: Thou art by no means valiant,\n  For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork\n  Of a poor worm: Thy best of rest is sleep,\n  And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st\n  Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;\n  For thou exist'st on many thousand grains\n  Which issue out of dust: Happy thou art not;\n  For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,\n  And what thou hast forget'st: Thou art not certain,\n  For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,\n  After the moon: If thou art rich, thou art poor;\n  For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,\n  Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,\n  And death unloads thee: Friend hast thou none;\n  For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,\n  Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,\n  For ending thee no sooner: Thou hast no youth nor age,\n  But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,\n  Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth\n  Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms\n  Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,\n  Thou hast neither heat, affection, limbs, nor beauty,\n  To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this,\n  That bears the name of life? Yet in this life\n  Lie hid more thousand deaths: yet death we fear,\n  That makes these odds all even.\"[83]\n\nThen collate yet further some more passages from the Essays:\n\n  \"They perceived her (the soul) to be capable of diverse\n  passions, and agitated by many languishing and painful\n  motions ... subject to her infirmities, diseases, and\n  offences, even as the stomach or the foot ... dazzled and\n  troubled by the force of wine; removed from her seat by the\n  vapours of a burning fever.... She was seen to dismay and\n  confound all her faculties by the only biting of a sick dog,\n  and to contain no great constancy of discourse, no virtue,\n  no philosophical resolution, no contention of her forces,\n  that might exempt her from the subjection of these\n  accidents....\"[84]\n\n  \"It is not without reason we are taught to take notice of\n  our sleep, for the resemblance it hath with death. How\n  easily we pass from waking to sleeping; with how little\n  interest we lose the knowledge of light, and of\n  ourselves....\"[85]\n\n  \"Wherefore as we from that instant take a title of being,\n  which is but a twinkling in the infinite course of an\n  eternal night, and so short an interruption of our perpetual\n  and natural condition, death possessing whatever is before\n  and behind this moment, and also a good part of this moment,\n  \"[86]\n\n  \"Every human nature is ever in the middle between being born\n  and dying, giving nothing of itself but an obscure\n  appearance and shadow, and an uncertain and weak\n  opinion.\"[87]\n\nCompare finally the line \"Thy best of rest is sleep\" (where the word\nrest seems a printer's error) with the passage \"We find nothing so sweet\nin life as a quiet and gentle sleep,\" already cited in connection with\nour fourth parallel.\n\n\nXVIII. The theme, in fine, is one of Montaigne's favourites. And the\nview that Shakspere had been impressed by it seems to be decisively\ncorroborated by the fact that the speech of Claudio to Isabella,\nexpressing those fears of death which the Duke seeks to calm, is\nlikewise an echo of a whole series of passages in Montaigne. Shakspere's\nlines run:\n\n \"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,\n  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot:\n  This sensible warm motion to become\n  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit\n  To bathe in fiery floods or to reside\n  In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,\n  To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,\n  And blown with restless violence round about\n  The pendent world; or to be worse than worst\n  Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts\n  Imagine howling!--'tis too horrible!...\"\n\nSo far as I know, the only idea in this passage which belongs to the\ncurrent English superstition of Shakspere's day, apart from the natural\nnotion of death as a mere rotting of the body, is that of the\npurgatorial fire; unless we assume that the common superstition as to\nthe souls of unbaptised children being blown about until the day of\njudgment was extended in the popular imagination to the case of executed\ncriminals. He may have heard of the account given by Empedocles, as\ncited in Plutarch,[88] of the punishment of the offending daemons, who\nwere whirled between earth and air and sun and sea; but there is no\nsuggestion in that passage that human souls were so treated. Dante's\nINFERNO, with its pictures of carnal sinners tossed about by the winds\nin the dark air of the second circle,[89] and of traitors punished by\nfreezing in the ninth,[90] was probably not known to the dramatist; nor\ndoes Dante's vision coincide with Claudio's, in which the souls are\nblown \"about the pendent world.\" Shakspere may indeed have heard some of\nthe old tales of a hot and cold purgatory, such as that of Drithelm,\ngiven by Bede,[91] whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew his idea\nof an alternate torture.[92] But there again, the correspondence is only\npartial; whereas in Montaigne's APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE we find,\npoetry apart, nearly every notion that enters into Claudio's speech:\n\n  \"The most universal and received fantasy, and which\n  endureth to this day, hath been that whereof Pythagoras is\n  made author ... which is that souls at their departure from\n  us did but pass and roll from one to another body, from a\n  lion to a horse, from a horse to a king, incessantly\n  wandering up and down, from house to mansion.... Some added\n  more, that the same souls do sometimes ascend up to heaven,\n  and come down again.... Origen waked them eternally, to go\n  and come from a good to a bad estate. The opinion that Varro\n  reporteth is, that in the revolutions of four hundred and\n  forty years they reconjoin themselves unto their first\n  bodies.... Behold her (the soul's) progress elsewhere: He\n  that hath lived well reconjoineth himself unto that star or\n  planet to which he is assigned; who evil, passeth into a\n  woman. And if then he amend not himself, he transchangeth\n  himself into a beast, of condition agreeing to his vicious\n  customs, and shall never see an end of his punishments until\n  ... by virtue of reason he have deprived himself of those\n  gross, stupid, and elementary qualities that were in him....\n  They (the Epicureans) demand, what order there should be if\n  the throng of the dying should be greater than that of such\n  as be born ... and demand besides, what they should pass\n  their time about, whilst they should stay, until any other\n  mansion were made ready for them.... Others have staved the\n  soul in the deceased bodies, wherewith to animate serpents,\n  worms, and other beasts, which are said to engender from the\n  corruption of our members, yea, and from our ashes....\n  Others make it immortal without any science or knowledge.\n  Nay, there are some of ours who have deemed that of\n  condemned men's souls devils were made....\"[93]\n\nIt is at a short distance from this passage that we find the suggestion\nof a frozen purgatory:\n\n  \"Amongst them (barbarous nations) was also found the belief\n  of purgatory, but after a new form, for what we ascribe unto\n  fire they impute unto cold, and imagine that souls are both\n  purged and punished by the vigor of an extreme\n  coldness.\"[94]\n\nAnd over and above this peculiar correspondence between the Essays and\nthe two speeches on death, we may note how some of the lines of the Duke\nin the opening scene connect with two of the passages above cited in\nconnection with Hamlet's last soliloquy, expressing the idea that nature\nor deity confers gifts in order that they should be used. The Duke's\nlines are among Shakspere's best:\n\n            \"Thyself and thy belongings\n  Are not thine own so proper as to waste\n  Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee.\n  Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,\n  Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues\n  Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike\n  As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched\n  But to fine issues: nor nature never lends\n  The smallest scruple of her excellence,\n  But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines\n  Herself the glory of a creditor,\n  Both thanks and use....\"\n\nHere we have once more a characteristically Shaksperean transmutation\nand development of the idea rather than a reproduction; and the same\nappears when we compare the admirable lines of the poet with a homiletic\nsentence from the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:--\n\n  \"It is not enough for us to serve God in spirit and soul; we\n  owe him besides and we yield unto him a corporal\n  worshipping: we apply our limbs, our motions, and all\n  external things to honour him.\"\n\nBut granting the philosophic as well as the poetic heightening, we are\nstill led to infer a stimulation of the poet's thought by the Essays--a\nstimulation not limited to one play, but affecting other plays written\nabout the same time. Another point of connection between HAMLET and\nMEASURE FOR MEASURE is seen when we compare the above passage, \"Spirits\nare not finely touched but to fine issues,\" with Laertes' lines[95]:\n\n \"Nature is fine in love, and when 'tis fine\n  It sends some precious instance of itself\n  After the thing it loves.\"\n\nAnd though such data are of course not conclusive as to the time of\ncomposition of the plays, there is so much of identity between the\nthought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and a notable passage in\nTROILUS AND CRESSIDA, as to strengthen greatly the surmise that the\nlatter play was also written, or rather worked-over, by Shakspere about\n1604. The phrase:\n\n                      \"if our virtues\n  Did not go forth of us, 'twere all the same\n  As if we had them not,\"\n\nis developed in the speech of Ulysses to Achilles[96]:\n\n                  \"A strange fellow here\n  Writes me that man--how dearly ever parted\n  How much in having, or without, or in--\n  Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,\n  Nor feels not what he knows, but by reflection;\n  As when his virtues shining upon others\n  Heat them, and they retort their heat again\n  To the first giver.\"\n\nI do not remember in Montaigne any such development of the idea as\nShakspere here gives it; indeed, we have seen him putting forth a\ncontrary teaching; and looking to the context, where Ulysses admits the\nthesis to be \"familiar,\" we are bound to infer a direct source for it.\nIn all probability it derives from Seneca, who in his treatise DE\nBENEFICIIS[97] throws out the germ of the ideas as to Nature demanding\nback her gifts, and as to virtue being nothing if not reflected; and\neven suggests the principle of \"thanks and use.\"[98] This treatise, too,\nlay to Shakspere's hand in the translation of 1578, where the passages:\n\"Rerum natura nihil dicitur perdere, quia quidquid illi avellitur, ad\nillam redit; nec perire quidquam potest, quod quo excidat non habet, sed\neodem evolvitur unde discedit\"; and \"quaedam quum sint honesta,\npulcherrima summae virtutis, nisi cum altero non habent locum,\" are\ntranslated:\n\n  \"The nature of a thing cannot be said to have foregone\n  aught, because that whatsoever is plucked from it returneth\n  to it again; neither can anything be lost which hath not\n  whereout of to pass, but windeth back again unto whence it\n  came;\"\n\nand\n\n  \"Some things though they be honest, very goodly and right\n  excellently vertuous, yet have they not their effect but in\n  a co-partner.\"\n\nWhether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne that sent him to Seneca,\nto whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot\ntell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we\nhave here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on\nwhich Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point\nor initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the\npoint of contact with Montaigne in HAMLET, where the saying that reason\nis implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many\ncorrespondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is\nmore subtly and deeply developed in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and still more\nsubtly and philosophically in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. The fact of the\nprocess of development is all that is here affirmed, over and above the\nactual phenomena of reproduction before set forth.\n\nAs to these, the proposition is that in sum they constitute such an\namount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about\nhabitual \"stealings.\" There is no justification for applying that to the\npassage in the TEMPEST, since not only is that play not known to have\nexisted in its present form in 1605,[100] when VOLPONE was produced, but\nthe phrase plainly alleges not one but many borrowings. I am not aware\nthat extracts from Montaigne have been traced in any others of the\nEnglish contemporary dramatists. But here in two plays of Shakspere,\nthen fresh in memory--the Second Quarto having been published in 1604\nand MEASURE FOR MEASURE produced in the same year--were echoes enough\nfrom Montaigne to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have owned, as did\nShakspere, the Florio folio, and to have been Florio's warm admirer. And\nthere seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the fact that, while\nwe find detached passages savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of\nthe same period, as in one of the concluding period, the TEMPEST, we do\nnot again find in any one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we\nhave seen in HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE, though the spirit\nof Montaigne's thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may be said to\ntinge all the later tragedies.\n\n(a) In OTHELLO (? 1604) we have Iago's \"'tis in ourselves that we are\nthus or thus,\" already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase--\n\n \"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....\n  He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,\n  Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all.\"\n\n--a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in\nthe Fortieth Essay.\n\n(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--\n\n \"And take upon's the mystery of things\n  As if we were God's spies;\"\n\n--which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays, THAT A MAN OUGHT\nSOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where\nMontaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of\nimposters the\n\n  \"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of\n  God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and\n  to see in the secrets of the divine will the\n  incomprehensible motives of its works.\"\n\nThis, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the\nargument of the APOLOGY is typified in the sentence:--\n\n  \"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our\n  proportions and conjectures to guess at God?\"\n\n(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a passage in\nthe essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104]\non the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply\nderides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference of\nthe stars--which very superstition he was later to support by his own\nauthority in the APOLOGY, as we have seen above, in the passage on the\n\"power and domination\" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the\nthirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest\nagainst human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration\nis directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: \"We entertain and\ncarry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some\ngreat matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn\nconsultation of the stars.\" Then follow references to Caesar's sayings as\nto his star, and the \"common foppery\" as to the sun mourning his death a\nyear.\n\n  \"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to\n  be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests\n  disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least\n  actions. 'There is no such society between heaven and us\n  that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as\n  mortal as we are.'\"\n\nThere seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this passage in\nEdmund's speech, where the word \"foppery\" is a special clue:\n\n  \"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we\n  are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own\n  behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the\n  moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity;\n  fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors\n  by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers\n  by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all\n  that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on....\"\n\n(d) Again, in MACBETH (1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff[105]:\n\n \"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,\n  Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break\"\n\n--an idea which also underlies Macbeth's \"this perilous stuff, which\nweighs upon the heart\"--recalls the essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which\nMontaigne remarks on the\n\n  \"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when\n  accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us,\" and on the\n  way in which \"the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears\n  and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself\";\n  going on to tell how the German Lord Raisciac looked on his\n  dead son \"till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having\n  suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark\n  dead to the ground.\"\n\nThe parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that\ndrawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:\n\n  Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent[107]--\"Light\n  troubles speak: the great ones are dumb.\"\n\nCertainly no one of these latter passages would singly suffice to prove\nthat Shakspere had read Montaigne, though the peculiar coincidence of\none word in Edgar's speech with a word in Florio, above noted, would\nalone raise the question. But even had Shakspere not passed, as we shall\nsee cause to acknowledge, beyond the most melancholy mood of Montaigne\ninto one of far sterner and more stringent pessimism, an absence or\ninfrequency of suggestions of Montaigne in the plays between 1605 and\n1610 would be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe in VOLPONE. That\ngibe, indeed, is not really so ill-natured as the term \"steal\" is apt to\nmake it sound for our ears, especially if we are prepossessed--as even\nMr. Fleay still seems to be--by the old commentators' notion of a deep\nill-will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. There was probably no such\nill-will in the matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust banter being\nenough to account for the form of his remark. As a matter of fact, his\nown plays are strewn with classic transcriptions; and though he\nevidently plumed himself on his power of \"invention\"[108] in the matter\nof plots--a faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack--he cannot\nconceivably have meant to charge his rival with having committed any\ndiscreditable plagiarism in drawing upon Montaigne. At most he would\nmean to convey that borrowing from the English translation of Montaigne\nwas an easy game as compared with his own scholar-like practice of\ntranslating from the Greek and Latin, and from out-of-the-way authors,\ntoo.\n\nHowever that might be, the fact stands that Shakspere did about 1604\nreproduce Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the\nreproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.\n\n\n\n\nIII.\n\n\nBut first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne\ninfluence is unique or exceptional. Of the many literary influences\nwhich an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, was Montaigne's the only\none which wrought deeply upon Shakspere's spirit, apart from those of\nhis contemporary dramatists and the pre-existing plays, which were then\nmodels and points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere must have\nthought much and critically of the methods and the utterance of his\nco-rivals in literary art, as he did of the methods of his\nfellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players in HAMLET was\nhardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet[109] which speaks of\nits author as\n\n  \"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,\"\n\nis one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems\nyield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110]\nthat the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:\n\n  \"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?\"\n\nhas reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his\nmost formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here concerned with\ninfluences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example;\nand the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact\ncomparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of\nMontaigne's Essays?\n\nThe matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even\nthe Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As\nregards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research\nduring two centuries; and of collations of parallel passages, apart from\nMontaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the\ndramatist's mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our\nown generation. As regards many of the parallel passages, the ground\nhas been pretty well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship brought to\nbear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean\nschool, as represented by Knight, did much to retard scientific\nconclusions on this as on other points.\n\nFarmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all\nopen-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical\nknowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further\ninvestigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the\neffect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;[113]\nand the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as\nagainst the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W.\nCunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's tragedies on Shakspere's.\nUnquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valuable\nresearch has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the\nElizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its\ntechnique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we\nhave seen, apparent echoes from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we\nhave seen, Dr. Cunliffe suggests sources for some Shaksperean passages\nin the Senecan tragedies, he is doubtful as to whether they represent\nany direct study of Seneca by Shakspere.\n\n  \"Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to Seneca,\" he\n  writes, \"is a question as difficult as it is interesting. As\n  English tragedy advances, there grows up an accumulation of\n  Senecan influence within the English drama, in addition to\n  the original source, and it becomes increasingly difficult\n  to distinguish between the direct and the indirect influence\n  of Seneca. In no case is the difficulty greater than in that\n  of Shakspere. Of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and\n  Massinger, we can say with certainty that they read Seneca,\n  and reproduced their readings in their tragedies; of\n  Middleton and Heywood we can say with almost equal certainty\n  that they give no sign of direct indebtedness to Seneca; and\n  that they probably came only under the indirect influence,\n  through the imitations of their predecessors and\n  contemporaries. In the case of Shakspere we cannot be\n  absolutely certain either way. Professor Baynes thinks it is\n  probable that Shakspere read Seneca at school; and even if\n  he did not, we may be sure that, at some period of his\n  career, he would turn to the generally accepted model of\n  classical tragedy, either in the original or in the\n  translation.\"[114]\n\nThis seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from\nparticular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence\nthe view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between\nSeneca's tragedies and Shakspere's are but cases of citation of\nsentences likely to have grown proverbial; and the most notable of the\nothers that have been cited by Dr. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes,\npoints to AEschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:\n\n \"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood\n  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather\n  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,\n  Making the green one red:\"\n\ncertainly corresponds closely with that of Seneca's Hercules:[115]\n\n \"Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica\n  Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox\n  Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,\n  Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet\n  Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,\n  Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,\n  Haerebit altum facinus\"\n\nand that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]\n\n \"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,\n  Maeotis undis pontico incumbens mari.\n  Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater\n  Tantum expiarit sceleris.\"\n\nBut these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from\nAEschylus,[117] are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have\nbecome stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were\nclearly well-fitted to become so for the mediaeval. The phrases used were\nalready classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:\n\n \"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys\n  Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus.\"[118]\n\nIn the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it\nhad doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and\ncontemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a\nrhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves\nSeneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play\nwhich may have been written before, though published after,\nMACBETH[120]:--\n\n \"Although the waves of all the Northern sea\n  Should flow for ever through those guilty hands,\n  Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be\"\n\n--a sad foil to Shakspere's\n\n \"The multitudinous seas incarnadine.\"\n\nIt is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose\nShakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise,\nthe passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection\non life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the\nother interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe.\nShakspere's\n\n                \"Diseases desperate grown\n  By desperate appliance are relieved,\n  Or not at all,\"[121]\n\nwhich he compares with Seneca's\n\n \"Et ferrum et ignis saepe medicinae loco est.\n  Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,\"[122]\n\n--a passage that may very well be the original\nfor the modern oracle about fire and iron--is\nreally much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates,\nthat \"Extreme remedies are proper for\nextreme diseases,\" and cannot be said to be\nmore than a proverb. In any case, it lay to\nShakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated\nby Florio:\n\n \"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies.\"\n\nEqually inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's\n\n \"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?\"\n\nand the sentence of Hercules:\n\n                    \"Nemo polluto queat\n  Animo mederi.\"[124]\n\nSuch a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and in THE TWO\nNOBLE KINSMEN (in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we\nhave the doctor protesting: \"I think she has a perturbed mind, which I\ncannot minister to.\"[125]\n\nAnd so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules' cry:\n\n \"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,\n  Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,\n  Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,\n  Etiam furorem.\"[126]\n\nand Macbeth's:\n\n \"I have lived long enough: my way of life\n  Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;\n  And that which should accompany old age,\n  As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,\n  I must not look to have.\"[127]\n\nHere there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the\nversification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a\nlament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct\nreproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again\nonly perfecting some previous declamation.\n\nThere is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:\n\n \"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward\n  To that they were before;\"[128]\n\nand\n\n        \"We but teach\n  Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return\n  To plague the inventor.\"[129]\n\n--which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere's hand than\nSeneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above\nconsidered, there was really little or nothing in the tragedies of\nSeneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a\ndeep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of\nreflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding\nintellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed\nhave drawn from one or two of Seneca's treatises, which do, in their\ndesperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual\nground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests\nalike of quantity and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the\nindirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere\nwas slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. Nor\nis it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at\nhand in translation. Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as\ncompared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne\nsays of the latter, that \"his manner of writing seemeth very tedious.\"\nOver the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as\nthe essayist does[130] over Cicero, \"I understand sufficiently what\ndeath and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise\nthem.\" For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either\ngoes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of\nfeeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and\neven to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious\nexamination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman's lantern,\nleaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. Under no\nstress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a\nman of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages.\nIt is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between\nfecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man\nof genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for\nstimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in\nShakspere's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.\n\nEven before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation\nabout dismissing the only other outstanding theory of a special\nintellectual influence undergone by Shakspere--the theory of Dr. Benno\nTschischwitz, that he read and was impressed by the Italian writings of\nGiordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the hypothesis are of the\nscantiest and the flimsiest. Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586,\nbefore Shakspere came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and\nLeicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings\nonly one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence\nwith any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In\nBruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio,\n\"Che e la materia di vostri versi,\" and the pedant replies, \"Litterae,\nsyllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae,\" on which Octavio\nagain asks: \"Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito.\"[131] So far\nas it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question to\nHamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet's answer, \"Words, words.\" But the\nscene is obviously a stock situation; and if there are any passages in\nHAMLET which clearly belong to the pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of\nHamlet with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's\nparallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put\nthemselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy\nrecalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] but he goes on to find\nanalogies between other passages in HAMLET and some of Bruno's\nphilosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made\nup of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.\nTschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:\n\n \"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!\"\n\nIt is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite\nimpossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to\nbe as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet's\nfigure of the melting of flesh into dew is an illustration of Bruno's\n\"atomic system,\" and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in\nHamlet's jeering answers to the king's demand for the body of Polonius.\nOf these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he\ntranslates from Bruno's CENA DE LE CENERI:--\n\n  \"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death\n  and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all\n  nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by\n  a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts,\n  rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily\n  taking place in a determinate series, under which everything\n  assumes the place of another.\"[133]\n\nIn the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which anticipates so\nremarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe,\n\"elucidates\" Hamlet's talk about worms and bodies, and his further\nsketch of the progress of Alexander's dust to the plugging of a\nbeer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest\nsupererogation. The passages cited from HAMLET, all of them found in the\nFirst Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than\nShakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of\nthe indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case\napproaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on\nthe contrary the \"leave not a wrack behind,\" in the TEMPEST, is an\nexpression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an\nendless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would\nnaturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is\nmerely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr.\nTschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the\nother hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of\ndrunkenness,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence\nin the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of\ndrunken practices.[135] Yet again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, \"Sol\net homo generant hominem,\" beside Hamlet's gibe about the sun breeding\nmaggots in a dead dog--a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period.\nThat the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself\nindirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of\naffirmation:\n\n  \"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,\n  or that Shakspere otherwise went any deeper into Bruno's\n  system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show\n  Shakspere, at the time of his writing of HAMLET, to have\n  already reached the heights of the thought of the age\n  (Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with\n  the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost\n  unintelligible passages in HAMLET are now cleared up by the\n  poet's acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the\n  writings of the Nolan.\"\n\nAll this belongs to the uncritical method of the German\nShakspere-criticism of the days before Ruemelin. It is quite possible\nthat Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his\nfriends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have\nprofoundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at Oxford on the\nimmortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the\nsubject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore\nconcerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from\nMontaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the\nverses on the \"shaping fantasies\" of \"the lunatic, the lover, and the\npoet,\" in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in Bruno\nas this:--\n\n  \"The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the\n  phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration\n  that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or\n  is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine\n  breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit\n  expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other\n  principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense\n  painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the\n  painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and\n  philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There\n  is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore\n  is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive\n  the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or\n  is nothing without it.\"[138]\n\nBut since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which he would\nhave been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known\nit, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much\nless read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his\nwork and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to\npassages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of\nthese above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere\ngot his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous passage in\nHENRY V.,[139] in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely\nframed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato's\nREPUBLIC and Cicero's DE REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide\nwith M. Stapfer[140] that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but\ngot his suggestion from some English translation or citation.\n\nIn fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere,\nas well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general\nas a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of\nothers; and among the books in his own language which we know him to\nhave read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back\nto Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most important and the most\npotential for suggestion and provocation.\n\n\n\n\nIV.\n\n\nTo have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for\nShakspere, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the\npositive facts of his life and circumstances--a thing made difficult for\nus in England through the transcendental direction given to our\nShakspere lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit,\nColeridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, as a mind of\nunapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us\nthat it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal\nindividuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we\nread Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of\nCharles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such\neulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics\nor of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who\nbecame an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played\nin inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little\nbrutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and\nrefashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences\npaid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that\nfilled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his\ndebtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or\ntook a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his\nfellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected\nfortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in\nwhich he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr.\nFurnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to\ntheatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts\ninto vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they\nremain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is\ntrue, protested at the close of his essay that he \"could not marry this\nfact,\" of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, \"to his verse;\"\nbut that deliverance has served only as a text for those who have\nembraced the fantastic tenet that Shakspere was but the theatrical\nagent and representative of Bacon; a delusion of which the vogue may be\npartly traced to the lack of psychological solidity in the ordinary\npresentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely\nleaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was\nintellectually to blame in that, seeing as he did the hiatus between the\npoet's life and the prevailing conception of his verse, he did not try\nto conceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to the solution\nthat Shakspere's mind was out of human ken. \"A good reader can in a sort\nnestle into Plato's brain and think from thence,\" he said; \"but not into\nShakspere's; we are still out of doors.\" We should indeed remain so for\never did we not set about patiently picking the locks where the\ntranscendentalist has dreamily turned away.\n\nIt is imperative that we should recommence vigilantly with the concrete\nfacts, ignoring all the merely aesthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where\nColeridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously invite us to acknowledge\na miraculous artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly gives forth\nthe intense vibration aroused in his spirit by Shakspere's ripest work,\nwe must turn back to track down the youth from Stratford; son of a\nburgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world;\nmarried at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, with small\nprospect of income, to the woman of twenty-five; ill at ease in that\nposition; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company\nof actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means\nof his moderate education, his \"small Latin and less Greek,\" his knack\nof fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began\nwe must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to\nbe looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which can be\ntaken to represent his young and unaided faculty, whether as regards\nconstruction or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of the modern\ndramatist, must have been to some extent forced on him in those years by\nthe nature of his situation; and after all that has been said by adorers\nof the quality of his wit and his verse in such early comedies as\nLOVE'S LABOUR LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader\nis apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections\nthat the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy\nnaturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be\nShakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his\nlater progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may\nsafely say with Mr. Fleay that \"there is not a play of his that can be\nreferred even on the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594,\nwhich does not bear the plainest internal evidence of having been\nrefashioned at a later time.\"[142] These plays, then, with all their\nevidences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot called \"clever\nyoung-mannishness,\" cannot serve us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind\nat the beginning of his career.\n\nBut it happens that we have such a measure in performances which, since\nthey imply no technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary\nsubstance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the\nWarwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the\nadherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our\npoets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he\npresumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were\nthe uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE\nRAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second\nof more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and\nthe other a still more calculated picture of female chastity: the two\nalike abnormally fluent, yet external, unimpassioned, endlessly\ndescriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for the sexual attraction of\nthe subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously\nreckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious\nreaders in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do\nthey give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so\noften without any determining superiority of mind--inexhaustible flow of\nwords and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless\nthrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere is\nrenowned above all English poets, not one, I think, is to be found in\nthose three thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded lines: on the\ncontrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct\nthemes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative\ninterest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as\nmust preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of\nproducing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of\ndescription without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of\ncapacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured\npoems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the\nsame time to secure the patronage of the Maecenas of the hour, Lord\nSouthampton, to whom it was dedicated, and the second produced and\nsimilarly dedicated on the strength of the success of the first. The\npoint here to be noted is that they gained the poet's ends. They\nsucceeded as saleable literature, and they gained the Earl's favour.\n\nAnd the rest of the poet's literary career, from this point forward,\nseems to have been no less prudently calculated. Having plenty of\nevidence that men could not make a living by poetry, even if they\nproduced it with facility; and that they could as little count on living\nsteadily by the sale of plays, he joined with his trade of actor the\nbusiness not merely of playwright but of part-sharer in the takings of\nthe theatre. The presumption from all we know of the commercial side of\nthe play-making of the times is that, for whatever pieces Shakspere\ntouched up, collaborated in, or composed for his company, he received a\ncertain payment once for all;[144] since there was no reason why his\npartners should treat his plays differently in this regard from the\nplays they bought of other men. Doubtless, when his reputation was made,\nthe payments would be considerable. But the main source of his income,\nor rather of the accumulations with which he bought land and house and\ntithes at Stratford, must have been his share in the takings of the\ntheatre--a share which would doubtless increase as the earlier partners\ndisappeared. He must have speedily become the principal man in the\nfirm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of\nplays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a\ntemperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not\nat all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness,\nnot at all obtrusive of its \"mission;\" but exhibiting simply a gift for\nacting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute\nobservation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling\nof the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by\ncommercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception\nof a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate\ncircumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so\npossessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much\ncultured, not profound, not deeply passionate; not particularly\nreflective though copious in utterance; a personality which of itself,\nif under no pressure of pecuniary need, would not be likely to give the\nworld any serious sign of mental capacity whatever.\n\nIn order, then, that such a man as this should develop into the\nShakspere of the great tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur\ntwo kinds of life-conditions with those already noted--the fresh\nconditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual\nstimulus. Without these, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest\npoetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking the spur of necessity or of\nsome outside call, it would be moved to seek poetic and dramatic\nutterance for its own relief. There is no sign here of an innate burden\nof thought, bound to be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate or\nresponsive faculty, capable of giving back with peculiar vividness and\nspontaneity every sort of impression which may be made on it. The\nfaculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the\nbare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece,\nwith only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's\nschooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years'\nassociation with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was\ncapable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital\nculture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must\ncome to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of\nhis way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear\nhardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so\neasily into the actor-manager with a good share in the company's\nprofits. There is almost nothing to show that the young Shakspere read\nanything save current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable book as\nNorth's PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his\nliterary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of\nJULIUS CAESAR may have been suggested to him by some other play-maker, as\nwas the case with his chronicle histories. In his contemporary, Ben\nJonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship\nas the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice,\nunwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately\nall the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add\nto the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out\nclearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and\nletters, but also far more plastically framed, and at the same time far\nmore clearly alive to the seriousness of the struggle for existence as a\nmatter of securing the daily bread-and-butter. It may be, indeed--who\nknows--that but for that peculiarly early marriage, with its consequent\nfamily responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little\nmore of youthful breathing-time: it may be that it was the existence of\nAnn Hathaway and her three children that made him a seeker for pelf\nrather than a seeker for knowledge in the years between twenty and\nthirty, when the concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual men.\nThe thesis undertaken in LOVE'S LABOUR LOST--that the truly effective\nculture is that of life in the world rather than that of secluded\nstudy--perhaps expresses a process of inward and other debate in which\nthe wish has become father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous\ncollegians like Greene for presuming, actor as he was, to write dramas,\nhe must have asked himself whether there was not something to be gained\nfrom such schooling as theirs.[145] But then he certainly made more than\nwas needed to keep the Stratford household going; and the clear shallow\nflood of VENUS AND ADONIS and the RAPE OF LUCRECE stands for ever to\nshow how far from tragic consciousness was the young husband and father\nwhen close upon thirty years old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet\ndied at Stratford; and there is nothing to show, says Mr. Fleay,[146]\nthat Shakspere had ever been there in the interval between his departure\nin 1587 and the child's funeral.\n\nBut already, it may be, some vital experience had come. Whatever view we\ntake of the drama of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's\nremarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of\nfaithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and\nimpassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to\nadd a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too,\nhe was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training\ninvolved in his craft of acting--a culture involving a good deal of\ncontact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as\nthen translated, and a psychological training of great though little\nrecognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the\npractice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of\nmanifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing the\nfaculties at once of sympathy and expression. In this respect Shakspere\nstood apart from his rivals, with their merely literary training. And in\npoint of fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening\nsense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently\nidealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness of\nmuch of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things,\nthe man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must\nhave been intensely appreciative of the charm of sex; and it is on that\nside that we are to look for his first contacts with the deeper forces\nof life. What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in fine, from all\nhis rivals, is just his peculiarly true and new[148] expression of the\nliving grace of womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the form of\npoetry and skilfully purified from the blemishes of the actual, but none\nthe less convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of\na rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the plastic\norganism of the first poems touched through and through with a hundred\nvibrations of deeper experience; the external and extensive method\ngradually ripening into an internal and intensive; the innate facility\nof phrase and alertness of attention turned from the physical to the\npsychical. But still it is to the psychics of sex, for the most part,\nthat we are limited. Of the deeps of human nature, male nature, as apart\nfrom the love of woman, the playwright still shows no special\nperception, save in the vivid portrait of Shylock, the exasperated Jew.\nThe figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier\nhistorical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of\nperception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling\nsense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality\nthat best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them.\nAnd in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a\nroundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature\nthus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all,\nremains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of\nwhich, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.\nFor it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been\npopularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he\ndid here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty\nof imagination always rectified and expanded rather than originated\ntypes and actions, was doubtless to give the hues and tones of perfect\nlife to the half-real inventions of others. This must always be insisted\non as the special psychological characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting\nin the doubtful case of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, he never invented a plot;\nhis male characters are almost always developments from an already\nsketched original; it is in drawing his heroines, where he is most\nidealistic, that he seems to have been most independently creative, his\noriginals here being doubtless the women who had charmed him, set living\nin ideal scenes to charm others. And it resulted from this specialty of\nstructure that the greater reality of his earlier male historic figures,\nas compared with those of most of his rivals, is largely a matter of\nsaner and more felicitous declamation--the play of his great and growing\nfaculty of expression--since he had no more special knowledge of the\ntypes in hand than had his competitors. It is only when his unequalled\nreceptive faculty has been acted upon by a peculiarly concentrated and\nreadily assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir\nThomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we\nfind Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries in the\nvirile treatment of virile problems no less than in the sympathetic\nrendering of emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos of passion.\nThe tragedy of ROMEO AND JULIET, with all its burning fervours and\nswooning griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of woe: it is\ntruly said of it that it is not fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS\nCAESAR we have touched a further depth of sadness. For the moving tragedy\nof circumstance, of lovers sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in\nexultant death, we have the profounder tragedy of mutually destroying\nenergies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration\ndogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching\nout the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the\nreader; to the master of the pathos of passion the student of the\ntragedy of universal life. It is thus by culture and experience--culture\nlimited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense--that the\nman Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as\nwe find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of\nthe supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism\nand the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond;\nculture that came without search, and could be undergone as\nspontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no\nmore wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. In\nthe English version of Plutarch's LIVES, pressed upon him doubtless by\nthe play-making plans of other men, Shakspere found the most effectively\nconcentrated history of ancient humanity that could possibly have\nreached him; and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of\nexpression because he received it so freely and vitally, in respect\nalike of his own plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the\nimpression was his mother tongue. It is plain that to the last he made\nno secondary study of antiquity. He made blunders which alone might warn\nthe Baconians off their vain quest: he had no notion of chronology:\nfinding Cato retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one to whose ideal\nCoriolanus had risen, he makes a comrade of Coriolanus say it, as if\nCato were a dead celebrity in Coriolanus' day; just as he makes Hector\nquote Aristotle in Troy. These clues are not to be put aside with\naesthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.\nAnd if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but\nto reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced\nantiquity with greater accuracy in minor things, tithing the mint and\nanise and cumin of erudition, they gave us of the central human forces,\nwhich it was their special business to realise, mere hollow and tedious\nparodies. Jonson was a scholar whose variety of classic reading might\nhave constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are\nmostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the\nexpression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive\nreality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. He represents\nindustry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of\nJonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into\nverse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the\nactors--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as\nspontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be\namong the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two\nmen, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the\nother. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard\nstudy, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic\nwork which gives little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere had none of\nthese characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it only\nneeded the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to\nmake him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth,\ncharm, tenderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity\nthat literature can show, recognisably so even though his work be almost\nconstantly hampered by the framework of other men's enterprises, which\nhe was so singularly content to develop or improve. Hence the critical\nimportance of following up the culture which evolved him, and above all,\nthat which finally touched him to his most memorable performance.\n\n\n\n\nV.\n\n\nIt is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary\nstatement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, in 1603,\nShakspere was thirty-seven years old, and he had written or refashioned\nKING JOHN, HENRY IV., THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,\nRICHARD II., TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, HENRY V., ROMEO AND JULIET,\nTHE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and JULIUS CAESAR. It is very likely that he\nknew Florio, being intimate with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and\nadmirer; and the translation, long on the stocks, must have been\ndiscussed in his hearing. Hence, presumably, his immediate perusal of\nit. Portions of it he may very well have seen or heard of before it was\nfully printed (necessarily a long task in the then state of the\nhandicraft); but in the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to\nbelieve, he read largely in 1603-4.\n\nHaving inductively proved the reading, and at the same time the fact of\nthe impression it made, we may next seek to realise deductively what\nkind of impression it was fitted to make. We can readily see what\nNorth's Plutarch could be and was to the sympathetic and\nslightly-cultured playwright; it was nothing short of a new world of\nhuman knowledge; a living vision of two great civilisations, giving to\nhis universe a vista of illustrious realities beside which the charmed\ngardens of Renaissance romance and the bustling fields of English\nchronicle-history were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He had\ndone wonders with the chronicles; but in presence of the long\nmuster-rolls of Greece and Rome he must have felt their insularity; and\nhe never returned to them in the old spirit. But if Plutarch could do so\nmuch for him, still greater could be the service rendered by Montaigne.\nThe difference, broadly speaking, is very much as the difference in\nphilosophic reach between JULIUS CAESAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS\nand LEAR.\n\nFor what was in its nett significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming\nthus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life\nand into Shakspere's ken? Simply the most living book then existing in\nEurope. This is not the place, nor am I the person, to attempt a\nsystematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has\nstirred to their best efforts the ablest of French critics; but I must\nneeds try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general\nEuropean culture. And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the\ncivilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically\ndeclared to be--the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the\ngreat Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality,\nmisses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch,\nbecause he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer\nof studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also\nis a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where\nMontaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only\nliving but growing. Only Chaucer, and he only in the Canterbury Tales,\ncan be thought of as a true modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is\nthere too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of\nDante is decisively mediaeval: it is the central point in mediaeval\nliterature. Montaigne was not only a new literary phenomenon in his own\nday: he remains so still; for his impressionism, which he carried to\nsuch lengths in originating it, is the most modern of literary\ninspirations; and all our successive literary and artistic developments\nare either phases of the same inspiration or transient reactions against\nit. Where literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within\nsight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most\ninteresting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards\nabsolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his,\nwhich is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our _bonne foi_\nis still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of\nall essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most\nsincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most\nfree-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace\nbecomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal\ncommonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he\ngoes behind them to rouse anew the living nerve. And there is no theme\non which he does not some time or other dart his sudden and searching\nglance. It is truly said of him by Emerson that \"there have been men\nwith deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance\nof thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to\nmake the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they\nbleed; they are vascular and alive.\" Such a voice, speaking at\nShakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the\nincomparable old-new French of the original, was in itself a revelation.\n\nI have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to\nShakspere a vibration of style as well as of thought; and it would be\ndifficult to overstate the importance of such an influence. A writer\naffects us often more by the pulse and pressure of his speech than by\nhis matter. Such an action is indeed the secret of all great literary\nreputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and\nthe beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They\nmust have affected Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in\npoint of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous\ntension and pith, fairly attributable to the stirring impact of the\nstyle of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of\ncolour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging\nstride. Seek in any of Shakspere's plays for such a strenuous rush of\nidea and rhythm as pulses through the soliloquy:\n\n \"How all occasions do inform against me,\"\n\nand you will gather that there has been a technical change wrought, no\nless than a moral and an intellectual. The poet's nerves have caught a\nnew vibration.\n\nBut it was not merely a congenial felicity and energy of utterance that\nMontaigne brought to bear on his English reader, though the more we\nconsider this quality of spontaneity in the essayist the more we shall\nrealise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's\nbook is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and\nreflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin\ncriticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh\nand pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality.\nFor Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the\nRenaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of\nhis contact with Latin literature. Other men must have come to know\nLatin as well as he; and hundreds could write it with an accuracy and\nfacility which, if he were ever capable of it, he must, by his own\nconfession, have lost before middle life,[150] though he read it\nperfectly to the last. But he is the only modern man whom we know to\nhave learned Latin as a mother tongue; and this fact was probably just\nas important in psychology as was the similar fact, in Shakspere's case,\nof his whole adult culture being acquired in his own language. It seems\nto me, at least, that there is something significant in the facts: (1)\nthat the man who most vividly brought the spirit or outcome of classic\nculture into touch with the general European intelligence, in the age\nwhen the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright,\nlearned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek\nliterature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of\nall of his craft has put most of breathing vitality into his pictures of\nancient history, despite endless inaccuracies of detail, read his\nauthorities only in his own language; and (3) that the English poet who\nin our own century has most intensely and delightedly sympathised with\nthe Greek spirit--I mean Keats--read his Homer only in an English\ntranslation. As regards Montaigne, the full importance of the fact does\nnot seem to me to have been appreciated by the critics. Villemain,\nindeed, who perhaps could best realise it, remarked in his youthful\neloge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne had his child taught\nLatin would bring the boy to the reading of the classics with an eager\ninterest where others had been already fatigued by the toil of grammar;\nbut beyond this the peculiarity of the case has not been much\nconsidered. Montaigne, however, gives us details which seem full of\nsuggestion to scientific educationists. \"Without art, without book,\nwithout grammar or precept, without whipping, without tears, I learned a\nLatin as pure as my master could give;\" and his first exercises were to\nturn bad Latin into good.[151] So he read his Ovid's Metamorphoses at\nseven or eight, where other forward boys had the native fairy tales; and\na wise teacher led him later through Virgil and Terence and Plautus and\nthe Italian poets in the same freedom of spirit. Withal, he never\nacquired any facility in Greek,[152] and, refusing to play the\napprentice where he was accustomed to be master,[153] he declined to\nconstrue in a difficult tongue; read his Plutarch in Amyot; and his\nPlato, doubtless, in the Latin version. It all goes with the peculiar\nspontaneity of his mind, his reactions, his style; and it was in virtue\nof this undulled spontaneity that he was fitted to be for Shakspere, as\nhe has since been for so many other great writers, an intellectual\nstimulus unique in kind and in potency.\n\nThis fact of Montaigne's peculiar influence on other spirits,\ncomparatively considered, may make it easier for some to conceive that\nhis influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above\nasserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest\ndegree--setting aside the disputed case of Bacon--are Pascal,\nMontesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of\nPascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy was contrary\nto Montaigne's, the influence went so far that the _Pensees_ again and\nagain set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken almost literally\nfrom the ESSAYS. Stung by the lack of all positive Christian credence in\nMontaigne, Pascal represents him as \"putting all things in doubt;\"\nwhereas it is just by first putting all things in doubt that Pascal\njustifies his own credence. The only difference is that where Montaigne,\ndisparaging the powers of reason by the use of that very reason, used\nhis \"doubt\" to defend himself alike against the atheists and the\northodox Christians, Catholic or Protestant, himself standing simply to\nthe classic theism of antiquity, Pascal seeks to demolish the theists\nwith the atheists, falling back on the Christian faith after denying the\ncapacity of the human reason to judge for itself. The two procedures\nwere of course alike fallacious; but though Pascal, the more austere\nthinker of the two, readily saw the invalidity of Montaigne's as a\ndefence of theism, he could do no more for himself than repeat the\nprocess, disparaging reason in the very language of the essayist, and\nsetting up in his turn his private predilection in Montaigne's manner.\nIn sum, his philosophy is just Montaigne's, turned to the needs of a\nbroken spirit instead of a confident one--to the purposes of a chagrined\nand exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of\nCicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the\n_Pensees_ might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all\nvigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence\nto fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's\nthought than any coherent or durable philosophic construction.\n\nIt would be little more difficult to show the debt of the _Esprit des\nLois_ to Montaigne's inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's\navowal that \"In most authors I see the man who writes: in Montaigne, the\nman who thinks.\"[154] That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in\nsociology as in philosophy. His whole activity is a seeking for causes;\nand in the very act of undertaking to \"humble reason\" he proceeds to\ninstruct and re-edify it by endless corrective comparison of facts. To\nbe sure, he departed so far from his normal _bonne foi_ as to affect to\nthink there could be no certainties while parading a hundred of his own,\nand with these some which were but pretences; and his pet doctrine of\ndaimonic fortune is not ostensibly favourable to social science; but in\nthe concrete, he is more of a seeker after rational law than any\nhumanist of his day. In discussing sumptuary laws, he anticipates the\neconomics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in discussing\necclesiastical law he anticipates the age of tolerance; in discussing\ncriminal law, the work of Beccaria; in discussing _a priori_ science,\nthe protest of Bacon; and in discussing education, many of the ideas of\nto-day. And it would be difficult to cite, in humanist literature before\nour own century, a more comprehensive expression of the idea of natural\nlaw than this paragraph of the APOLOGY:\n\n  \"If nature enclose within the limits of her ordinary\n  progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the\n  judgments, the opinions of men, if they have their\n  revolutions, their seasons, their birth, and their death,\n  even as cabbages; if heaven doth move, agitate, and roll\n  them at his pleasure, what powerful and permanent authority\n  do we ascribe unto them. If, by uncontrolled experience, we\n  palpably touch [orig. \"Si par experience nous touchons a la\n  main,\" _i.e._, nous maintenons, nous pretendons: an idiom\n  which Florio has not understood] that the form of our being\n  depends of the air, of the climate, and of the soil wherein\n  we are born, and not only the hair, the stature, the\n  complexion, and the countenance, but also the soul's\n  faculties ... in such manner that as fruits and beasts do\n  spring up diverse and different, so men are born, either\n  more or less war-like, martial, just, temperate, and docile;\n  here subject to wine, there to theft and whoredom, here\n  inclined to superstition, there addicted to misbelieving....\n  If sometimes we see one art to flourish, or a belief, and\n  sometimes another, by some heavenly influence; ... men's\n  spirits one while flourishing, another while barren, even as\n  fields are seen to be, what become of all those goodly\n  prerogatives wherewith we still flatter ourselves?\"[155]\n\nAll this, of course, has a further bearing than Montaigne gives it in\nthe context, and affects his own professed theology as it does the\nopinions he attacks; but none the less, the passage strikes at the\ndogmatists and the pragmatists of all the preceding schools, and hardily\nclears the ground for a new inductive system. And in the last essay of\nall he makes a campaign against bad laws, which unsays many of his\nprevious sayings on the blessedness of custom.\n\nIn tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be hard to point to an\neminent French prose-writer who has not been affected by him.\nSainte-Beuve finds[156] that La Bruyere \"at bottom is close to\nMontaigne, in respect not only of his style and his skilfully\ninconsequent method, but of his way of judging men and life\"; and the\nliterary heredity from Montaigne to Rousseau is recognised by all who\nhave looked into the matter. The temperaments are profoundly different;\nyet the style of Montaigne had evidently taken as deep a hold of the\nartistic consciousness of Rousseau as had the doctrines of the later\nwriters on whom he drew for his polemic. But indeed he found in the\nessay on the Cannibals the very theme of his first paradox; in\nMontaigne's emphatic denunciations[157] of laws more criminal than the\ncrimes they dealt with, he had a deeper inspiration still; in the essay\non the training of children he had his starting-points for the\nargumentation of _Emile_; and in the whole unabashed self-portraiture of\nthe ESSAYS he had his great exemplar for the _Confessions_. Even in the\nvery different case of Voltaire, we may go at least as far as Villemain\nand say that the essayist must have helped to shape the thought of the\ngreat freethinker; whose _Philosophe Ignorant_ may indeed be connected\nwith the APOLOGY without any of the hesitation with which Villemain\nsuggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his\npollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La\nRochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] _De l'utile et de\nl'honneste_; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M.\nStapfer remarks, can be detected in the passages of the all-discussing\nGascon.\n\nAmong English-speaking writers, to say nothing of those who, like Sterne\nand Lamb, have been led by his example to a similar felicity of freedom\nin style, we may cite Emerson as one whose whole work is coloured by\nMontaigne's influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing one\nside of Emerson's gospel, may be said to have found it all where Emerson\nfound it, in the Essay on Solitude.[160] The whole doctrine of\nintellectual self-preservation, the ancient thesis \"flee from the press\nand dwell in soothfastness,\" is there set forth in a series of ringing\nsentences, most of which, set in Emerson or Thoreau, would seem part of\ntheir text and thought. That this is no random attribution may be\nlearned from the lecture on \"Montaigne: the Sceptic,\" which Emerson has\nincluded in his REPRESENTATIVE MEN. \"I remember,\" he says, telling how\nin his youth he stumbled on Cotton's translation, \"I remember the\ndelight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had\nmyself written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to\nmy thought and experience.\" That is just what Montaigne has done for a\nmultitude of others, in virtue of his prime quality of spontaneous\nself-expression. As Sainte-Beuve has it, there is a Montaigne in all of\nus. Flaubert, we know, read him constantly for style; and no less\nconstantly \"found himself\" in the self-revelation and analysis of the\nessays.\n\nAfter all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after\nwhat we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on\nculture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, for its evolution,\nthere can no longer seem to an open mind anything of mere paradox in the\nopinion that the essays are the source of the greatest expansive\nmovement of the poet's mind, the movement which made him--already a\nmaster of the whole range of passional emotion, of the comedy of mirth\nand the comedy and tragedy of sex--the great master of the tragedy of\nthe moral intelligence. Taking the step from JULIUS CAESAR to HAMLET as\ncorresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the\nfirst play exhibits the concrete perception of the fatality of things,\n\"the riddle of the painful earth\"; in the second, in its final form, the\nperception has emerged in philosophic consciousness as a pure\nreflection. The poet has in the interim been revealed to himself; what\nhe had perceived he now conceives. And this is the secret of the whole\ntransformation which the old play of HAMLET has received at his hands.\nWhere he was formerly the magical sympathetic plate, receiving and\nrectifying and giving forth in inspired speech every impression, however\ndistorted by previous instruments, that is brought within the scope of\nits action, he is now in addition the inward judge of it all, so much so\nthat the secondary activity tends to overshadow the primary. The old\nHAMLET, it is clear, was a tragedy of blood, of physical horror. The\nleast that Shakspere, at this age, could have done with it, would be to\noverlay and transform the physical with moral perception; and this has\nalready been in part done in the First Quarto form. The mad Hamlet and\nthe mad Ophelia, who had been at least as much comic as tragic figures\nin the older play, are already purified of that taint of their barbaric\nbirth, save in so far as Hamlet still gibes at Polonius and jests with\nOphelia in the primitive fashion of the pretended madman seeking his\nrevenge. But the sense of the futility of the whole heathen plan, of the\nvanity of the revenge to which the Christian ghost hounds his son, of\nthe moral void left by the initial crime and its concomitants, not to be\nfilled by any hecatomb of slain wrongdoers--the sense of all this, which\nis the essence of the tragedy, though so few critics seem to see it,\nclearly emerges only in the finished play. The dramatist is become the\nchorus to his plot, and the impression it all makes on his newly active\nspirit comes out in soliloquy after soliloquy, which hamper as much as\nthey explain the action. In the old prose story, the astute barbarian\ntakes a curiously circuitous course to his revenge, but at last attains\nit. In the intermediate tragedy of blood, the circuitous action had been\npreserved, and withal the revenge was attained only in the general\ncatastrophe, by that daimonic \"fortune\" on which Montaigne so often\nenlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie\nand judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive,\nthe theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of\nspirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable\nevil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic\nspirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred\nsuggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a\nself-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past.\nHence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be\nno doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has\nobscured it, making the scheming barbarian into a musing pessimist, who\nyet waywardly plays the mock-madman as of old, and kills the \"rat\"\nbehind the arras; doubts the Ghost while acting on his message;\nphilosophises with Montaigne and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of\nthe Christianised savage, who fears to send the praying murderer to\nheaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of\nShakspere's consciousness, working in his subjective way on the old\nmaterial, made inevitable a moral anachronism and contradiction,\nanalogous in its kind to the narrative anachronisms of his historical\nplays. But none the less, this tragedy, the first of the great group\nwhich above all his other work make him immortal, remains perpetually\nfascinating, by virtue even of that \"pale cast of thought\" which has\n\"sicklied it o'er\" in the sense of making it too intellectual for\ndramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic,\nbrooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate\nthe minds of those who read and meditate the text, and the old\nsensational elements of murder, ghost, fencing and killing, which hold\nthe interest of the crowd--between these constituents, HAMLET remains\nthe most familiar Shaksperean play.\n\nThis very pre-eminence and permanence, no doubt, will make many students\nstill demur to the notion that a determining factor in the framing of\nthe play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's essays. And it would be\neasy to overstate that thesis in such a way as to make it untrue.\nIndeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking, so overstated it. Had I come to\nhis main proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's ideas\nin HAMLET, I think I should have felt it to be as excessive in the\nopposite direction as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.\nChasles:[161]--\n\n  \"This date of 1603 (publication of Florio's translation) is\n  instructive; the change in Shakspere's style dates from this\n  very year. Before 1603, imitation of Petrarch, of Ariosto,\n  and of Spenser is evident in his work: after 1603, this\n  coquettish copying of Italy has disappeared; no more\n  crossing rhymes, no more sonnets and concetti. All is\n  reformed at once. Shakspere, who had hitherto studied the\n  ancients only in the fashion of the fine writers of modern\n  Italy, ... now seriously studies Plutarch and Sallust, and\n  seeks of them those great teachings on human life with which\n  the chapters of Michael Montaigne are filled. Is it not\n  surprising to see Julius Caesar and Coriolanus suddenly taken\n  up by the man who has just (tout a l'heure) been describing\n  in thirty-six stanzas, like Marini, the doves of the car of\n  Venus? And does not one see that he comes fresh from the\n  reading of Montaigne, who never ceased to translate,\n  comment, and recommend the ancients ...? The dates of\n  Shakspere's CORIOLANUS, CLEOPATRA, and JULIUS CAESAR are\n  incontestable. These dramas follow on from 1606 to 1608,\n  with a rapidity which proves the fecund heat of an\n  imagination still moved.\"\n\nAll this must be revised in the light of a more correct chronology.\nShakspere's JULIUS CAESAR dates, not from 1604 but from 1600 or 1601,\nbeing referred to in Weever's MIRROR OF MARTYRS, published in 1601, to\nsay nothing of the reference in the third Act of HAMLET itself, where\nPolonius speaks of such a play. And, even if it had been written in\n1604, it would still be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its\nproduction, with that of CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, to the\ninfluence of Montaigne, when every one of these themes was sufficiently\nobtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's translation of Amyot's\nPLUTARCH. Any one who will compare CORIOLANUS with the translation in\nNorth will see that Shakspere has followed the text down to the most\nminute and supererogatory details, even to the making of blunders by\nputting the biographer's remarks in the mouths of the characters. The\ncomparison throws a flood of light on Shakspere's mode of procedure; but\nit tells us nothing of his perusal of Montaigne. Rather it suggests a\nreturn from the method of the revised HAMLET, with its play of reverie,\nto the more strictly dramatic method of the chronicle histories, though\nwith a new energy and concision of presentment. The real clue to\nMontaigne's influence on Shakspere beyond HAMLET, as we have seen, lies\nnot in the Roman plays, but in MEASURE FOR MEASURE.\n\nThere is a misconception involved, again, in M. Chasles' picture of an\nabrupt transition from Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that of\nHAMLET and the Roman plays. He overlooks the intermediate stages\nrepresented by such plays as ROMEO AND JULIET, HENRY IV., KING JOHN, the\nMERCHANT OF VENICE, and AS YOU LIKE IT, all of which exhibit a great\nadvance on the methods of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, with its rhymes and\nsonnets and \"concetti.\" The leap suggested by M. Chasles is exorbitant;\nsuch a headlong development would be unintelligible. Shakspere had first\nto come practically into touch with the realities of life and character\nbefore he could receive from Montaigne the full stimulus he actually did\nundergo. Plastic as he was, he none the less underwent a normal\nevolution; and his early concreteness and verbalism and externality had\nto be gradually transmuted into a more inward knowledge of life and art\nbefore there could be superimposed on that the mood of the thinker,\nreflectively aware of the totality of what he had passed through.\n\nFinally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakspere's mind is not that\npresented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their\nintense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing\nimpressions than the play of his own criticism on the general problem of\nlife. For the full revelation of this we must look rather in the great\ntragedies, notably in LEAR, and thereafter in the subsiding movement of\nthe later serious plays. There it is that we learn to give exactitude to\nour conception of the influence exerted upon him by Montaigne, and to\nsee that, even as in the cases of Pascal and Montesquieu, Rousseau and\nEmerson, what happened was not a mere transference or imposition of\nopinions, but a living stimulus, a germination of fresh intellectual\nlife, which developed under new forms. It would be strange if the most\nreceptive and responsive of all the intelligences which Montaigne has\ntouched should not have gone on differentiating itself from his.\n\n\n\n\nVI.\n\n\nWhat then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's\nthought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and\nassimilate the ideas of the elder, how far did he reject them, how far\nmodify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our\ninquiry, were it only because Shakspere is firstly and lastly a dramatic\nwriter. But he is not only that: he is at once the most subjective, the\nmost sympathetic, and the most self-witholding of dramatic writers.\nConceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology,\nhe is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions\nof his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral\nlogic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that\nthesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical\nsympathies which must be taken for granted. Much facile propaganda has\nbeen made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious\nutterance found in his plays--even in the portions which analytical\ncriticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we must look\nto his general handling of the themes with which the current religion\ndeals, in order to surmise his attitude to that religion. And in the\nsame way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral\nissues, in order to gather his general attitude to the doctrine of\nMontaigne.\n\nAt the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange\nproposition of Mr. Jacob Feis--that Shakspere deeply disliked the\nphilosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to\nrealise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the\nmind of anyone capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis\nseeks to found his assertion. If there were no other argument against\nit, the bare fact that the tragedy of HAMLET existed before Shakspere,\nand that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the\nboards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every\nother point of view, the notion is equally preposterous.\n\nNo human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a\ncriticism of Montaigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of violences\nof interpretation which might almost startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they\nblamed Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner of the ordinary\ncritical moralist, they could not possibly regard that delay as a kind\nof vice arising from the absorption of Montaignesque opinions. In the\nvery year of the appearance of Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon\nto make the assumption that Montaigne was demoralising mankind, even if\nwe assume Shakspere to have ever been capable of such a judgment. And\nthat assumption is just as impossible as the other. According to Mr.\nFeis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and\nmade him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them--this,\nwhen we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier\nplay. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show\nShakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by\nstifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of\nserious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a\npitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play;\nbut to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his\nopinions is merely ridiculous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing\nin Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere was in a position to regard\nas open to his denunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. Feis\ncan suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct with Montaigne's philosophy\nis that Montaigne was a quietest, preaching and practising withdrawal\nfrom public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with\nthis. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public affairs; and\nas soon as he had gained a competence he retired, at the age of\nforty-seven, to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument brings us to the\nvery crudest form of the good old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had\nbeen a good and resolute man he would have killed his uncle out of hand,\nwhether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married\nOphelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]\nAnd to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that\nShakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the\nretributive slaughter of guilty uncles by wronged nephews.\n\nIn the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 anticipated Mr. Feis's view\nof HAMLET as a sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a whit more\nplausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles his book[163]: \"Hamlet: a\nDrama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and\ncosmopolitan view of things taken by Michael de Montaigne\"; and his\ngeneral position is that Shakspere wrote the play as \"the apotheosis of\na practical Christianity,\" by way of showing how any one like Hamlet,\nlacking in Christian piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must\nneeds come to a bad end, even in a good cause. We are not entitled to\ncharge Herr Stedefeld's thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing\nthat Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint of a kind of\nProtestant freethinker, who sees in Shakspere a champion of free inquiry\nagainst the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; while strictly\northodox Christians have found in Hamlet's various allusions to deity,\nand in his \"as for me, I will go pray,\" a proof alike of his and of\nShakspere's steadfast piety. Against all such superficialities of\nexegesis alike our safeguard must be a broad common-sense induction.\n\nWe are entitled to say at the outset, then, only this, that Shakspere at\nthe time of working over HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE in 1603-1604 had\nin his mind a great deal of the reasoning in Montaigne's Essays; and\nthat a number of the speeches in the two plays reproduce portions of\nwhat he had read. We are not entitled to assume that these portions are\nselected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here\nlimited to saying that he put certain of Montaigne's ideas or statements\nin the mouths of his characters where they would be appropriate. It does\nnot follow that he shared the feelings of Claudio as to the possible\nlife of the soul after death. And when Hamlet says to Horatio, on the\nstrangeness of the scene with the Ghost:\n\n \"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome!\n  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,\n  Than are dreamt of in our philosophy\"--\n\nthough this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of\nMontaigne's essay,[164] THAT IT IS FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO\nOUR SUFFICIENCY; and though we are entitled to believe that Shakspere\nhad that essay or its thesis in his mind, there is no reason to suppose\nthat the lines express Shakspere's own belief in ghosts. Montaigne had\nindicated his doubts on that head even in protesting against sundry\ndenials of strange allegations: and it is dramatically fitting that\nHamlet in the circumstances should say what he does. On the other hand,\nwhen the Duke in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, playing the part of a friar\npreparing a criminal for death, gives Claudio a consolation which does\nnot contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial\nsalvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are entitled to infer from\nsuch a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the\nChristian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his\nhabitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in\nsuch a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of\nforgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply\ndisregard on the part of the dramatist. It is true that Isabella,\npleading to Angelo in the second Act, speaks as a believing Christian on\nthe point of forgiveness for sins; and the versification here is quite\nShaksperean. But a solution of the anomaly is to be found here as\nelsewhere in the fact that Shakspere was working over an existing\nplay;[165] and that in ordinary course he would, if need were, put the\nreligious pleading of Isabella into his own magistral verse just as he\nwould touch up the soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing his\nuncle at prayers--a soliloquy which we know to have existed in the\nearlier forms of the play. The writer who first made Isabella plead\nreligiously with Angelo would have made the Duke counsel Claudio\nreligiously. The Duke's speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's\nspecial insertion; and it is to be taken as negatively exhibiting his\nopinions.\n\nIn the same way, the express withdrawal of the religious note at the\nclose of HAMLET--where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere making the\ndying prince say \"the rest is silence\" instead of \"heaven receive my\nsoul,\" as in the First Quarto--may reasonably be taken to express the\nsame agnosticism on the subject of a future life as is implied in the\nDuke's speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be taken to suggest a\npurpose of holding Hamlet up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet\nis made repeatedly to express himself, in talk and in soliloquy, as a\nbeliever in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are\nmostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature\nof the pagan allusion to the \"divinity that shapes our ends.\" What is\ndefinitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion.\n\nDid Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne? What were\nreally Montaigne's religious and philosophic opinions? We must consider\nthis point also with more circumspection than has been shown by most of\nMontaigne's critics. The habit of calling him \"sceptic,\" a habit\ninitiated by the Catholic priests who denounced his heathenish use of\nthe term \"Fortune,\" and strengthened by various writers from Pascal to\nEmerson, is a hindrance to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the\nword \"sceptic\" has passed through two phases of significance, and may\nstill have either. In the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a\ngood deal of a \"sceptic,\" because the main purport of the APOLOGY OF\nRAYMOND SEBONDE appears to be the discrediting of human reason all\nround, and the consequent shaking of all certainty. And this method\nstrikes not only indirectly but directly at the current religious\nbeliefs; for Montaigne indicates a lack of belief in immortality,[166]\nbesides repeatedly ignoring the common faith where he would naturally\nbe expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth and fortieth essays\nhereinbefore cited, and in his discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As\nis complained by Dean Church:[167] \"His views, both of life and death,\nare absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to\nbelieve the Gospel.\" That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously\nof the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are\nsuch as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His\nprofession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of\nshowing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism,\nthan the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ideals; for he\nindicates alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his sense of the\nfolly of insisting on the whole body of dogma. When fanatical\nProtestants, uncritical of their own creed, affected to doubt the\nsincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, he was naturally piqued.\nBut he was more deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when the few\nbut keen freethinkers of the time treated the THEOLOGIA NATURALIS of\nSebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a\nfeeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to\nretaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some\nill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the\nAPOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but\nwith a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation\nof the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For\nhimself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, of the school of\nCicero and Seneca; and as regards that side of his own thought he is not\nat all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally protested against all\nattempts to bring deity down to human conceptions, while himself doing\nthat very thing, as every theist needs must.\n\nShakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the traditional deism of the\npagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian\nfaith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But,\nwhether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be\nby the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to\nagnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his\nfirst serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all\nappearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the\nserene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception\nof things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, so\nabnormally alive to all impressions, that when he fully faced the darker\nsides of universal drama, with his reflective powers at work, he must\nutter a pessimism commensurate with the theme. This is part, if not the\nwhole, of the answer to the question \"Why did Shakspere write\ntragedies?\"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's,\nthat the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic\nserenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he \"described hell because he\nhad felt hell.\"[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of\ntragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE),\nafter having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must\nconclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas\nformerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its\ntragedies mostly from others, it now took its comedies mostly from\nothers and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the\ngloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the new tragedies is\npartly a reflex of his own experience, but also in large part an\nexpression of the philosophy to which he had been led by his reading, as\nwell as by his life. For we must finally avow that the pervading thought\nin the tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the case. In\nOTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of\nwrong--weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is\nalready a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of\nevil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate\ninsistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and\nprudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a\nnote of gloom as is struck in the lines:\n\n \"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods:\n  They kill us for their sport.\"\n\nAnd since there is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any\ndecorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the\nadmission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than\nMontaigne's unembittered \"cosmopolitan view of things.\" Instead of\nreacting against Montaigne's \"scepticism,\" as Herr Stedefeld supposes,\nhe produced yet other tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the wronged\nalike exhibit less and not more of Christian faith than Hamlet,[172] and\nin which there is no hint of any such faith on the part of the\ndramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre persistence in the presentment\nof unrelieved evil. The utterly wicked Iago has as much of religion in\nhis talk as anyone else in OTHELLO, using the phrases \"Christian and\nheathen,\" \"God bless the mark,\" \"Heaven is my judge,\" \"You are one of\nthose that will not serve God, if the devil bid you,\" \"the little\ngodliness I have,\" \"God's will,\" and so forth; the utterly wicked Edmund\nin LEAR, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's \"sceptical\"\npassage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral\npurpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in\nwhich the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions,\ngives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very\ninfluences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The\nwhole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in\nstellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the\nmouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand,\ndeclare that \"it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;\"[174] and\nthough he had previously made Romeo speak of \"the yoke of inauspicious\nstars,\" and the Duke describe mankind as \"servile to all the skiey\ninfluences,\" and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] express\nhis belief in \"a most auspicious star.\" In the case of Montaigne, who\ngoes on yet again to contradict himself in the APOLOGY itself,\nsatirising afresh the habit of associating deity with all human\nconcerns, we are driven to surmise an actual variation of opinion--the\nvivacious intelligence springing this way or that according as it is\nreacting against the atheists or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of\ncourse, is not a coherent philosopher; the way to systematic philosophic\ntruth is a path too steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit\nas his, \"sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy\";[176]\nand the net result of his \"Apology\" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset the\nsystem of that sober theologian as well as all others. Whether\nShakspere, on the other hand, could or did detect all the\ninconsistencies of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which we are not\nentitled to more than a surmise; but we do find that on certain issues\non which Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,\nShakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the\nessayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master\ndoctrine that we should live \"according to nature,\" is given to talking\nof \"art\" and \"nature\" in the ordinary manner, carrying the primitive\ncommonplace indeed to the length of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the\nCannibals,[177] speaking of \"savages,\" he protests that\n\n  \"They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild which\n  nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath\n  produced, whereas indeed they are those which ourselves have\n  altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their\n  common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the\n  true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most\n  lively and vigorous;\"[178]\n\ndeciding with Plato that\n\n  \"all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by\n  art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of the two\n  first; the least and imperfect by this last.\"\n\nAnd in the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing that\n\n  \"Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and guides\" the\n  lower animals, \"as if by the hand, to all the actions and\n  commodities of their life,\" while, \"as for us, she abandons\n  us to hazard and fortune, and to seek by art the things\n  necessary to our conservation,\"\n\nthough he proceeds to insist on the contrary that \"nature has\nuniversally embraced all her creatures,\" man as well as the rest, and to\nargue that man is as much a creature of nature as the rest--since even\nspeech, \"if not natural, is necessary\"--he never seems to come within\nsight of the solution that art, on his own showing, is just nature in a\nnew phase. But to that point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the\nWINTER'S TALE, one of the latest plays (? 1611), written about the time\nwhen we know him to have been reading or re-reading the essay on the\nCannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant gillyflowers in her garden,\n\n                 \"For I have heard it said\n  There is an art which in their piedness shares\n  With great creating nature,\"\n\nthe old king answers:\n\n                       \"Say there be:\n  Yet nature is made better by no mean,\n  But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art\n  Which you say adds to nature, is an art\n  That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry\n  A gentle scion to the wildest stock\n  And make conceive a bark of baser kind\n  By bud of nobler race: This is an art\n  Which does mend nature--change it rather; but\n  The art itself is nature.\"[180]\n\nIt is an analysis, a criticism, a philosophic demonstration; and the\nsubtle poet smilingly lets us see immediately that he had tried the\nargument on the fanatics of \"nature,\" fair or other, and knew them\nimpervious to it. \"I'll not put,\" says Puritan Perdita, after demurely\ngranting that \"so it is\"--\n\n                          \"I'll not put\n  The dibble in earth to set one slip of them.\"\n\nThe mind which could thus easily pierce below the inveterate fallacy of\nthree thousand years of conventional speech may well be presumed capable\nof rounding Montaigne's philosophy wherever it collapses, and of setting\nit aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never\nconvict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we\nnever seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS\nseems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the\ndeep-striking intelligence that first stirred him to philosophise.\n\nAnd yet, supposing this to be so, there is none the less a lasting\ncommunity of thought between the two spirits, a lasting debt from the\nyounger to the elder. Indeed, we cannot say that at all points\nShakspere outwent his guide. It is a curious reflection that they had\nprobably one foible in common; for we know Montaigne's little weakness\nof desiring his family to be thought ancient, of suppressing the fact of\nits recent establishment by commerce; and we have evidence which seems\nto show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] despite rebuffs, the\nformal constitution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On the other hand,\nthere is nothing in Shakspere's work--the nature of the case indeed\nforbade it--to compare in democratic outspokenness with Montaigne's\nessay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]\nthat \"the souls of emperors and cobblers are all cast in one same mould\"\ncould not well be echoed in Elizabethan drama; and indeed we cannot well\nbe sure that Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his fixed habit of\ntaking kings and princes and generals and rich ones for his personages.\nBut then, on the other hand, we cannot be sure that this was anything\nmore than a part of his deliberate life's work of producing for the\nEnglish multitude what that multitude cared to see, and catching London\nwith that bait of royalty which commonly attracted it. It remains a fine\nquestion whether his extravagant idealisation and justification of Henry\nV.--which, though it gives so little pause to some of our English\ncritics, entitled M. Guizot to call him a mere John Bull in his ideas of\ninternational politics--it remains disputable whether this was exactly\nan expression of his own thought. It is notable that he never again\nstrikes the note of blatant patriotism. And the poets of that time,\nfurther, seem to have had their tongues very much in their cheeks with\nregard to their Virgin Queen; so that we cannot be sure that Shakspere,\npaying her his fanciful compliment,[184] was any more sincere about it\nthan Ben Jonson, who would do as much while privately accepting the\ngrossest scandal concerning her.[185] It is certainly a remarkable fact\nthat Shakspere abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry over her\ndeath, incurring reproof by his silence.[186]\n\nHowever all that may have been, we find Shakspere, after his period of\npessimism, viewing life in a spirit which could be expressed in terms of\nMontaigne's philosophy. He certainly shaped his latter years in\naccordance with the essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other man in\nShakspere's theatrical group deliberately turning his back, as he did,\non the many-coloured London life when he had means to enjoy it at\nleisure, and seeking to possess his own soul in Stratford-on-Avon, in\nthe circle of a family which had already lived so long without him. But\nthat retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense\nexperience, is a main fact in Shakspere's life, and one of our main\nclues to his innermost character. Emerson, never quite delivered from\nPuritan prepossessions, avowed his perplexity over the fact \"that this\nman of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject\nthan had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some\nfurlongs forward into Chaos--that he should not be wise for himself: it\nmust even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure\n(!) and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.\" If\nthis were fundamentally so strange a thing, one might have supposed that\nthe transcendentalist would therefore \"as a stranger give it welcome.\"\nApproaching it on another plane, one finds nothing specially perplexing\nin the matter. Shakspere's personality was an uncommon combination; but\nwas not that what should have been looked for? And where, after all, is\nthe evidence that he was \"not wise for himself\"?[187] Did he not make\nhis fortune where most of his rivals failed? If he was \"obscure,\" how\notherwise could he have been less so? How could the bankrupt tradesman's\nson otherwise rise to fame? Should he have sought, at all costs, to\nbecome a lawyer, and rise perchance to the seat of Bacon, and the\nopportunity of eking out his stipend by bribes? If it be conceded that\nhe must needs try literature, and such literature as a man could live\nby; and if it be further conceded that his plays, being so marvellous in\ntheir content, were well worth the writing, where enters the \"profanity\"\nof having written them, or of having acted in them, \"for the public\namusement\"? Even wise men seem to run special risks when they discourse\non Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own anomaly.\n\nIt is indeed fair to say that Shakspere must have drunk a bitter cup in\nhis life as an actor. It is true that that calling is apt to be more\nhumiliating than another to a man's self-respect, if his judgment remain\nsane and sensitive. We have the expression of it all in the\nSonnets:[188]\n\n \"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,\n  And made myself a motley to the view,\n _Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear_,\n _Made old offences of affections new_.\"\n\nIt is impossible to put into fewer and fuller words the story, many a\nyear long, of sordid compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn its\nown inner life into matter for the stage. But he who can read Shakspere\nmight be expected to divine that it needed, among other things, even\nsome such discipline as that to give his spirit its strange universality\nof outlook. And he who could esteem both Shakspere and Montaigne might\nhave been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of\nthe final retirement, the dramatic caterer finally winning, out of his\nearnings, the peace and self-possession that the essayist had inherited\nwithout toil. He must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Montaigne's\nvery words[189]: \"My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously,\nwhat remains to me of life; there is nothing for which I am minded to\nmake a strain: not knowledge, of whatever great price it be.\" And when\nhe at length took himself away to the quiet village of his birth, it\ncould hardly be that he had not in mind those words of the essay[190] on\nSOLITUDE:\n\n  \"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether\n  ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish\n  our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness,\n  wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long\n  enough for others, live we the remainder of all life unto\n  ourselves.... Shake we off these violent hold-fasts which\n  elsewhere engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. The\n  greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be\n  his own. It is high time to shake off society, since we can\n  bring nothing to it....\"\n\nA kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells\nof revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and\nexhorts the soul to live aright:\n\n    \"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss,\n  And let that live to aggravate thy store;\n    Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;\n  Within be fed; without be rich no more:\n    So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,\n    And death once dead, there's no more dying then\"--\n\nan echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, herein before cited.[192]\n\nIn perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and\ncontemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of\nMontaigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, as with a wondrous\nsunset, the play which one would fain believe the last of all. At the\nend, as at the beginning, we find the poet working on a pre-existing\nbasis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we\nfind him picturing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal types of\nwomanhood, who stand out with a fugitive radiance from the surroundings\nof mere humanity; but over all alike, in the TEMPEST, there is the\nfusing spell of philosophic reverie. Years before, in HAMLET, he had\ndramatically caught the force of Montaigne's frequent thought that\ndaylight life might be taken as a nightmare, and the dream life as the\nreal. It was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist above all\nmen, even were it not pressed upon him by the essayist's reiterations:\n\n  \"Those which have compared our life unto a dream, have\n  happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When\n  we dream, our soul liveth, worketh, and exerciseth all her\n  faculties, even and as much as when it waketh.... We wake\n  sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so clear,\n  yet can I never find my waking clear enough, or without\n  dimness.... Why make we not a doubt whether our thinking\n  and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some\n  kind of sleeping?\"[193]\n\n  \"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination\n  will forge me commodities and afford means and delights\n  wherewith my mind is really tickled and essentially gladded.\n  How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by\n  such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical\n  passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of\n  yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there\n  anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over\n  whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the\n  Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some\n  ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the\n  right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to\n  forego it for a dream.\"[194]\n\n  \" ... Our reasons do often anticipate the effect and have\n  the extension of their jurisdiction so infinite, that they\n  judge and exercise themselves in inanity, and to a not\n  being. Besides the flexibility of our invention, to frame\n  reasons unto all manner of dreams; our imagination is\n  likewise found easy to receive impressions from falsehood,\n  by very frivolous appearances.\"[195]\n\nAgain and again does the essayist return to this note of mysticism, so\ndistinct from the daylight practicality of his normal utterance. And it\nwas surely with these musings in his mind that the poet makes Prospero\npronounce upon the phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed at his\nbehest. We know, indeed, that the speech proceeds upon a reminiscence of\nfour lines in the Earl of Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves\nvery tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be\nremembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into\nhis all-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his\nsubtler measure. The Earl's lines run:\n\n \"Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt;\n    Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon broken;\n  And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant;\n    All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.\n  Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,\n    With furniture superfluously fair;\n  Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls,\n    Evanish all like vapours in the air.\"\n\nThe sonorities of the rhymed verse seem to have vibrated in the poet's\nbrain amid the memories of the prose which had suggested to him so much;\nand the verse and prose alike are raised to an immortal movement in the\ngreat lines of Prospero:\n\n                    \"These our actors,\n  As I foretold you, are all spirits, and\n  Are melted into air, into thin air.\n  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,\n  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,\n  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,\n  Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve\n  And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,\n  Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff\n  As dreams are made on_, and our little life\n  Is rounded with a sleep.\"\n\nIn the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason,\nas some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his\nUtopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges the dialogue as to\nexpress his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will\nbe remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of the villains of the\npiece, and Alonso, the wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of the\nideal community to distract Alonso's troubled thoughts; Sebastian and\nAntonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, \"Pr'ythee, no more, thou\ndost talk nothing to me.\" Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was\nmeant to state Shakspere's prophetic derision for all communisms and\nsocialisms and peace congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained\noracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the\nprinciple of \"Gott mit uns.\" And it may well have been that Shakspere,\nlooking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that\nhe humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in\nthe mouth of a surly rascal--he has done as much elsewhere. But he was\nsurely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no\nmore Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than AS YOU LIKE\nIT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay,\nwhich was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted\nwith some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man\nto repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban[196]\nas the real \"cannibal,\" in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his\nimpression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET, Measure for\nMeasure, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had\nreached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong, the\nsane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he\ncould not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old\ntragedy of revenge which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he\nfound didactically enough set down in the essay on Diversion:[197]\n\n  \"Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great and natural\n  impression: I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial\n  of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him\n  not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had\n  struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed\n  I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that\n  passion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the\n  beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the\n  goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I\n  diverted him to ambition.\"\n\nAnd now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the\ndrama:--\n\n \"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,\n  Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury\n  Do I take part; the rarer action is\n  In virtue than in vengeance....\"\n\nThe principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's society; even the\ncursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] as a necessary member of\nit:--\n\n \"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,\n  Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices\n  That profit us.\"\n\nIt is surely not unwarrantable to pronounce, then, finally, that the\npoet who thus watchfully lit his action from the two sides of passion\nand sympathy was in the end at one with his \"guide, philosopher, and\nfriend,\" who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of\nhis own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] \"I esteem all\nmen my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman,\nsubordinating this national tie to the common and universal.\" Here, too,\nwas not Montaigne the first of the moderns?\n\n  [1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of\n  Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.\n\n  [2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers,\n      I mean such as are happy in the Italian,\n      Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly\n      Almost as much as from Montaignie;\n      He has so modern and facile a vein,\n      Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.\n\n                                           --Act iii. sc. 2.\n\n  [3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.\n\n  [4] Article in _Journal des Debats_, 7 November, 1846,\n  reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, ed. 1879, p.\n  136.\n\n  [5] _Montaigne_ (Serie des _Grands Ecrivains Francais_),\n  1895, p. 105.\n\n  [6] _Moliere et Shakspere._\n\n  [7] _Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.\n\n  [8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July,\n  1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John\n  Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).\n\n  [9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.\n\n  [10] Book I, Essay 33.\n\n  [11] _Advice_ in Florio.\n\n  [12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._\n\n  [13] B. III, Ch. 12.\n\n  [14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.\n\n  [15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.\n\n  [16] Book I, ch. 23.\n\n  [17] _Ibid._\n\n  [18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this\n  confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est:\n  prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's\n  phrase.\n\n  [19] \"O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason\" (Act\n  I, Scene 2.)\n\n  [20] Act II, Sc. 2.\n\n  [21] Act IV, Scene 2.\n\n  [22] Act IV, Scene 4.\n\n  [23] See Furniss's Variorum edition of _Hamlet, in loc._\n\n  [24] B. I, Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.\n\n  [25] B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.\n\n  [26] B. II, Chap. 12; _Ibid_, p. 459.\n\n  [27] B. II, Chap. 33.\n\n  [28] _Shakespere and Montaigne_, 1884, p. 88.\n\n  [29] B. III, Chap. 12.\n\n  [30] Act III, Scene 3.\n\n  [31] B. I, ch. 22.\n\n  [32] Act II, Scene 2.\n\n  [33] _Othello_, Act II, Scene 3.\n\n  [34] B. I, ch. 40, \"That the taste of goods or evils doth\n  greatly depend on the opinion we have of them.\"\n\n  [35] B. I, ch. 50.\n\n  [36] B. I, ch. 22.\n\n  [37] B. III, ch. 10.\n\n  [38] Act V, Scene 4.\n\n  [39] On reverting to Mr. Feis's book I find that in 1884 he\n  had noted this and others of the above parallels, which I\n  had not observed when writing on the subject in 1883. In\n  view of some other parallels and clues drawn by him, our\n  agreements leave me a little uneasy. He decides, for\n  instance (p. 93) that Hamlet's phrase \"foul as Vulcan's\n  stithy\" is a \"sly thrust at Florio\" who in his preface calls\n  himself \"Montaigne's Vulcan\"; that the Queen's phrase\n  \"thunders in the index\" is a reference to \"the Index of the\n  Holy See and its thunders\"; and that Hamlet's lines \"Why let\n  the stricken deer go weep\" are clearly a satire against\n  Montaigne, \"who fights shy of action.\" Mr. Feis's book\n  contains so many propositions of this order that it is\n  difficult to feel sure that he is ever judicious. Still, I\n  find myself in agreement with him on some four or five\n  points of textual coincidence in the two authors.\n\n  [40] Act I, Scene 4.\n\n  [41] B. II, Chap. 33.\n\n  [42] It is further relevant to note that in the essay _Of\n  Drunkenness_ (ii. 2) Montaigne observes that \"drunkenness\n  amongst others appeareth to me a gross and brutish vice,\"\n  that \"the worst estate of man is where he loseth the\n  knowledge and government of himself,\" and that \"the grossest\n  and rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is\n  only that which keepeth it in credit.\" The reference is to\n  Germany: but Shakspere in _Othello_ (Act II, Sc. 3) makes\n  Iago pronounce the English harder drinkers than either the\n  Danes or the Hollanders; and the lines:\n\n   \"This heavy-headed revel, east and west,\n    Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations;\n    They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase,\n    Soil our addition.\"\n\n  might also be reminiscent of Montaigne, though of course\n  there is nothing peculiar in such a coincidence.\n\n  [43] B. III, Chap. 7.\n\n  [44] B. III, Chap. 4.\n\n  [45] B. III, Chap. 10.\n\n  [46] B. III, Chap. 2.\n\n  [47] B. III, Chap. 13.\n\n  [48] B. I, Chap. 38.\n\n  [49] B. III, Chap. 4.\n\n  [50] B. I, Chap. 40.\n\n  [51] B. II, Chap. 8.\n\n  [52] B. II, Chap. 18.\n\n  [53] _De Officus_ i, 4: _cf._ 30.\n\n  [54] 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation\n  entitled _A Treatise of Morall Philosophie_ by W. Baudwin,\n  4th enlargement by T. Paulfreyman. 1600, pp. 44-46, where\n  there is a closely parallel passage from Zeno as well as\n  that of Cicero.\n\n  [55] Mr. Feis makes this attribution.\n\n  [56] B. II, Chap. 1.\n\n  [57] This may fairly be argued, perhaps, even of the\n  somewhat close parallel, noted by Mr. Feis, between Laertes'\n  lines (I, 3):\n\n   \"For nature, crescent, does not grow alone\n    In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes\n    The inward service of the mind and soul\n    Grows wide withal,\"\n\n  and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the\n  _Apology_\n\n   \"The mind is with the body bred, we do behold.\n    It jointly grows with it, it waxeth old.\"\n\n  Only the slight coincidence of the use of the (then\n  familiar) verb \"wax\" in both passages could suggest\n  imitation in the case of such a well-worn commonplace.\n\n  [58] See some cited at the close of this essay in another\n  connection.\n\n  [59] B. II, Chap. 12.\n\n  [60] Act IV, Scene 3.\n\n  [61] \"_Le monde est un branloire perenne_\" (Book III, Essay\n  2). Florio translates that particular sentence: \"The world\n  runs all on wheels\" a bad rendering.\n\n  [62] B. III, Chap. 3.\n\n  [63] B. II, Chap. 17.\n\n  [64] It may fairly be laid down as practically certain, from\n  what we know of the habit of circulating works in manuscript\n  at that period, and from what Florio tells us in his\n  preface, that translations of some of the essays had been\n  passed about before Florio's folio was printed. [65] _Varia\n  Historia_, XII, 23.\n\n  [66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in\n  Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of\n  Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. Sec. 1) gives it further\n  currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.\n\n  [67] B. II, Chap. 5.\n\n  [68] B. II, Chap. 3.\n\n  [69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.\n\n  [70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893,\n  p. 80-5.\n\n  [71] Actus III, 865-866.\n\n  [72] Actus IV, 1526-7.\n\n  [73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in\n  Doering's edition.\n\n  [74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._\n\n  [75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the\n  commentators have noticed the same sentiment.\n\n  \"Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path.\"\n\n  It was in fact a poetic commonplace.\n\n  [76] Act 5, Scene 6.\n\n  [77] Act v, sc. 1.\n\n  [78] I, 22.\n\n  [79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3\n\n  [80] ii, 2\n\n  [81] ii, 10.\n\n  [82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a\n  desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is\n  first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would\n  find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of\n  Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).\n\n  [83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of\n  similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ (\"To\n  die is all as common as to live\" etc., Act iv., sc. 4) it\n  will be seen that the querying form as well as the\n  elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the\n  speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne\n\n  [84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._\n\n  [85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.\n\n  [86] _Apology._\n\n  [87] _Ibid._, near end.\n\n  [88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.\n\n  [89] Canto v.\n\n  [90] Canto xxxii.\n\n  [91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends\n  that the mediaeval Inferno was built up. The torture of cold\n  was the northern contribution to the scheme. Compare Warton,\n  _History of English Poetry_, sec. 49, and Wright's _Saint\n  Patrick's Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.\n\n  [92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.\n\n  [93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.\n\n  [94] _Ibid._ p. 621.\n\n  [95] Act iv, sc. 5.\n\n  [96] iii, 3.\n\n  [97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.\n\n  [98] B. v, cc. 22-25.\n\n  [99] ii, 32.\n\n  [100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on\n  Shakspere_ (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the _Tempest_ was\n  written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight\n  whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of\n  Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the\n  Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written\n  immediately after the publication of that work. The argument\n  is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came\n  out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or\n  never.\n\n  [101] Act v, sc. 3.\n\n  [102] i, 31.\n\n  [103] ii, 13.\n\n  [104] Act i, sc. 2.\n\n  [105] Act iv, sc. 3.\n\n  [106] i, 2.\n\n  [107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).\n\n  [108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first\n  ed., preserved by Gifford.\n\n  [109] The 29th.\n\n  [110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed.\n  p. 222.\n\n  [111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove\n  Shakspere classically learned is that made in the _Critital\n  Observations on Shakspere_ (1746) of the Rev. John Upton, a\n  man of great erudition and much random acuteness (shown\n  particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from\n  the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as\n  was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of\n  to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax\n  are peculiarly unconvincing.\n\n  [112] It may not be out of place here to say a word for\n  Farmer in passing, as against the strictures of M. Stapfer,\n  who, after recognising the general pertinence of his\n  remarks, proceeds to say (_Shakspere and Classical\n  Antiquity_, Eng. trans, p. 83) that Farmer \"fell into the\n  egregious folly of speaking in a strain of impertinent\n  conceit: it is as if the little man for little he must\n  assuredly have been--was eaten up with vanity.\" This is in\n  its way as unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has\n  misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against,\n  not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed\n  to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards\n  Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative--and in the\n  preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote:\n  \"Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him\n  above all other men.\"\n\n  [113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.\n\n  [114] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, pp.\n  66-67.\n\n  [115] _Hercules Furens_, ad fin. (1324-1329.).\n\n  [116] _Hippolytus_, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)\n\n  [117] _Choephori_, 63-65.\n\n  [118] Carm. lxxxviii, _In Gellium_. See the note in\n  Doering's edition.\n\n  [119] _Gerusalemme_, xviii, 8.\n\n  [120] _The Insatiate Countess_, published in 1613.\n\n  [121] _Hamlet_, Act iv, sc. 3.\n\n  [122] _Agamemnon_, 152-153.\n\n  [123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)\n\n  [124] _Hercules Furens_, Act. V. 1261-2.\n\n  [125] Act iv, Sc. 3.\n\n  [126] _Hercules Furens_, 1258-61.\n\n  [127] _Macbeth_, Act v, Sc. 2.\n\n  [128] _Ibid._ Act iv, Sc. 2.\n\n  [129] _Ibid._ Act i, sc. 7.\n\n  [130] B. ii, ch. 10.\n\n  [131] Tschischwitz, _Shakspere-Forschungen_, i. 1868, S. 52.\n\n  [132] \"Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere\n  Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie\n  enthaelt so masslose Obscoenitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen\n  staerksten Stellen daneben fast jungfraeulich erscheint\" (Work\n  cited, S. 52).\n\n  [133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's\n  translation, so far as syntax permits.\n\n  [134] Act i, Sc. 4.\n\n  [135] Work cited, Sc. 59.\n\n  [136] See Frith's _Life of Giordano Bruno_, 1889, pp.\n  121-128.\n\n  [137] Act v. Sc. 1.\n\n  [138] Cited by Noack, art. _Bruno_, in\n  _Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon_.\n\n  [139] Act i, Sc. 2.\n\n  [140] Work cited, p. 90.\n\n  [141] It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr.\n  Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakspere,\n  even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on\n  deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on\n  Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial\n  method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary\n  steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President\n  of the New York Shakspere Society, entitled _Shakspere in\n  Fact and Criticism_ (New York, 1888), is certainly not open\n  to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially\n  rationalistic attitude is indicated in a sentence of his\n  preface: \"My own idea has been that William Shakspere was a\n  man of like passions with ourselves, whose moods and veins\n  were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings,\n  employments, vocations ... and that, great as he was, and\n  oceanic as was his genius, we can read him all the better\n  because he was, after all, a man....\" In recognising the\n  good sense of Mr. Morgan's general attitude, I must not be\n  understood to endorse his rejection of the \"metrical tests\"\n  of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to\n  be about the most important English contribution to the\n  scientific comprehension of Shakspere. On the other hand, it\n  may be said that the naturalistic conception of Shakspere as\n  an organism in an environment was first closely approached\n  in the present century by French critics, as Guizot and\n  Chasles (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted\n  by Green, having been founded on a study by Chasles); that\n  the naturalistic comprehension of _Hamlet_, as an incoherent\n  whole resulting from the putting of new cloth into an old\n  garment, was first reached by the German Ruemelin (_Shakspere\n  Studien_); and that the structural anomalies of _Hamlet_ as\n  an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix\n  (_Die Shakspereomanie_) these two critics thus making amends\n  for much vain discussion of _Hamlet_ by their countrymen\n  before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the\n  man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America.\n  The admirable work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in\n  the analysis of the text and the revelation of its\n  non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make little impression on\n  English culture; while such a luminous manual as Mr. Barrett\n  Wendell's _William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan\n  Literature_ (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook\n  and appreciation, points to decided progress in rational\n  Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the _Shakspere\n  Primer_ of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently\n  scientific throughout.\n\n  [142] _Life of Shakspere_, 1886, p. 128.\n\n  [143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's _Shakspere's Venus and\n  Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect_.\n\n  [144] Professor Dowden notes in his _Shakspere Primer_ (p.\n  12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe,\n  the theatrical lessee, vary from L4 to L8, and not till\n  later did it rise as high as L20 for a play by a popular\n  dramatist.\n\n  [145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;--\n\n    But thou art all my art, and dost advance\n    As high as learning my rude ignorance.\n\n  [146] _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 29, 128.\n\n  [147] See it in his _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 120-124. Mr.\n  Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best \"documented\" of all,\n  has received little attention in comparison with Mr.\n  Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.\n\n  [148] Only in Chaucer (_e.g._, _The Book of the Duchess_) do\n  we find before his time the successful expression of the\n  same perception; and Chaucer counted for almost nothing in\n  Elizabethan letters.\n\n  [149] See Fleay's _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 130-1.\n\n  [150] Cp. the _Essays_, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol.\n  ii, pp. 40, 231.)\n\n  [151] _Essays_, i, 25; _cf._ i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i,\n  pp. 304, 429.)\n\n  [152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)\n\n  [153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)\n\n  [154] _Pensees Diverses._ Less satisfying is the further\n  _pensee_ in the same collection:--\"Les quatre grand poetes,\n  Platon, _Malebranche_, _Shaftesbury_, Montaigne.\"\n\n  [155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.\n\n  [156] _Port Royal_, 4ieme edit., ii. 400, _note_.\n\n  [157] B. iii, Chap. 13.\n\n  [158] \"In the midst of our compassion, we feel within I know\n  not what bitter sweet touch of malign pleasure in seeing\n  others suffer.\" (Comp. La Rochefoucauld, _Pensee_ 104.)\n\n  [159] B. iii, Chap. 1.\n\n  [160] i, Chap. 38.\n\n  [161] _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, p. 133.\n\n  [162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms\n  even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.\n\n  [163] _Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's_ [_sic_\n  throughout book] _gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische\n  Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne_, von G. F.\n  Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.\n\n  [164] B. i, Chap. 26.\n\n  [165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in\n  Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_; and there was probably\n  an intermediate drama.\n\n  [166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.\n\n  [167] _Oxford Essays_, p. 279. Sterling, from his\n  Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne\n  that \"All that we find in him of Christianity would be\n  suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral\n  beings\" (_London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p.\n  340.)\n\n  [168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he\n  added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.\n\n  [169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the\n  _Cornhill Magazine_, August, 1880.\n\n  [170] Art. cited, _end_.\n\n  [171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to _Leopold_\n  Shakspere p. lxxxvii.\n\n  [172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion\n  goes no further.\n\n  [173] See the passage cited above in section iii in\n  connection with _Measure for Measure_.\n\n  [174] Act iv, Sc. 2.\n\n  [175] Act i, Sc. 2.\n\n  [176] B. i, Chap. 20.\n\n  [177] B. i, Chap. 30.\n\n  [178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.\n\n  [179] _Ibid._, pp. 477-478.\n\n  [180] _Here_, it may be said, there is a trace of the\n  influence of Bruno's philosophy; and it may well be that\n  Shakspere did not spontaneously strike out the thought for\n  himself. But I am not aware that any parallel passage has\n  been cited.\n\n  [181] Fleay's _Life_, pp. 138, &c.\n\n  [182] B. i, Chap. 42.\n\n  [183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)\n\n  [184] _Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.\n\n  [185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden\n\n  [186] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of\n  Shakspere_, 5th ed., p. 175.\n\n  [187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless\n  difficulty on this head. In his _Shakspere in Fact and\n  Criticism_, already cited, he writes (p. 316): \"I find him\n  ... living and dying so utterly unsuspicious that he had\n  done anything of which his children might care to hear, that\n  he never even troubled himself to preserve the manuscript of\n  or the literary property in a single one of the plays which\n  had raised him to affluence.\" As I have already pointed out,\n  there is no reason to suppose that Shakspere could retain\n  the ownership of his plays any more than did the other\n  writers who supplied his theatre. They belonged to the\n  partnership. Besides, he could not possibly have published\n  as _his_ the existing mass, so largely made up of other\n  men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after\n  his death, being simply bent on making money.\n\n  [188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.\n\n  [189] B. ii, Chap. 10.\n\n  [190] B. i, Chap. 38.\n\n  [191] This may be presumed to have been written between 1603\n  and 1609, the date of the publication of the Sonnets. As Mr.\n  Minto argues, \"the only sonnet of really indisputable date\n  is the 107th, containing the reference to the death of\n  Elizabeth\" (_Characteristics_, as cited, p. 220). As the\n  first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take\n  those remaining as of later date.\n\n  [192] It more particularly echoes, however, two passages in\n  the nineteenth essay: \"There is no evil in life for him that\n  hath well conceived, how the privation of life is no evil.\n  To know how to die, doth free us from all subjection and\n  constraint.\" \"No man did ever prepare himself to quit the\n  world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I\n  shall do. The deadest deaths are the best\"\n\n  [193] ii, 12.\n\n  [194] iii, 11.\n\n  [195] iii, 4.\n\n  [196] In all probability this character existed in the\n  previous play, the name being originally, as was suggested\n  last century by Dr. Farmer, a mere variant of \"Canibal.\"\n\n  [197] iii, 4.\n\n  [198] Act ii, Sc. 2.\n\n  [199] iii, 9.\n\n\n\n\nBY THE SAME AUTHOR.\n\nBUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: A Study in\nSociology.\n\nTHE SAXON AND THE CELT: A Study in\nSociology.\n\nESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD:\nNew Series.\n\nMODERN HUMANISTS.\n\nTHE FALLACY OF SAVING: A Study in\nEconomics.\n\nTHE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: A Study\nin Economics.\n\nCHRIST AND KRISHNA: A Study in Mythology.\nEtc. Etc.\n\nTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED,\n\n16, John Street, Bedford Row, London, W.C.\n\nNow Ready 2s. 6d. net.\n\n+THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY.+\n\n_An Anatomy of the Disease and a Theory of Curative Treatment._\n\nBY GEOFFREY MORTIMER.\n\n\n+PRESS OPINIONS.+\n\n_Pall Mall Gazette_, MAY 31, 1897:\n\n\" ... That, of a surety, is an unpleasant indictment; and, having thus\ngenially introduced himself to his reader, the author goes bald-headed\nfor Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Podsnap, and public opinion as voiced according to\nthe oracles of Mrs. Smith and Brown, of Little Muddleton Road, and for\nall the cherished fetishes of Suburbia.\"\n\n_Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper_, MAY 30, 1897:\n\n\"To persons who like hard hitting, vigorous English levelled at the cant\nof Grundyism, this book will come as a great treat.\"\n\n_Weekly Times and Echo_, MAY 30, 1897:\n\n\"'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth\nreading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has\nvotaries in England, where one would least expect to find them.\"\n\nTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED,\n\n16. John Street, Bedford Row, London, W.C.\n\nNow Ready. 8s. net,\n\n+THE SAXON AND THE CELT.+\n\nBY JOHN M. ROBERTSON.\n\n\n+PRESS OPINIONS.+\n\n\n_Daily Chronicle_:\n\nAlthough the title of this book defines its scope, it does not indicate\nits main purpose. That is to show that the Celtic race has been\nmisrepresented by a number of historians, from Mommsen to Froude, as\nincapable of self-government; and to prove, by inference, its fitness\nfor Home Rule.... The major argument is based by Mommsen and his school\non the assumption of permanent distinctions among races; and therefore\nMr. Robertson applies himself, with a large measure of success, to the\ntask of showing that the theory of innate persistent qualities marking\noff one people from another has no ethnological justification.... Mr.\nRobertson is able to make short and easy work of the loose writing which\nsums up those (imaginary) characters in epithet or epigram.... Mr.\nRobertson's lively style and happy allusiveness keep the reader\ninterested to the end....\n\nTHE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED,\n\n16, John Street, Bedford Row, London, W.C.\n\nJust published, 10s. net,\n\n+PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHY+\n\n_AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY._\n\nBy HUGH MORTIMER CECIL.\n\n\n+PRESS OPINIONS.+\n\n_The Sun_, MARCH 31, 1897:\n\nThe author of \"Pseudo-Philosophy\" handles his weapons well, and seems to\nus in many instances to occupy positions which, with our present human\nintelligence, are almost unassailable. On the other hand, of course,\nchampions of orthodoxy, as a rule, frankly admit that some of their\ntenets and the justice of certain aspects of the divine policy cannot be\ncomprehended by the natural man. But Mr. Cecil's strong feelings\noccasionally carry him too far, as when in the preface he seems to use\n\"religious obscurantism\" as a synonym for religion generally. The former\nmay have been opposed to social progress, as he says. To contend that\nthe same charge will stand against the latter is only to ignore the\nfact, if not indeed the law, that the great social awakenings have\nalmost invariably followed hard upon the great religious revivals.","title":"Montaigne and Shakspere","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":35506}