Montaigne and Shakspere Part 7

"I'll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."

The mind which could thus easily pierce below the inveterate fallacy of three thousand years of conventional speech may well be presumed capable of rounding Montaigne's philosophy wherever it collapses, and of setting it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking intelligence that first stirred him to philosophise.

And yet, supposing this to be so, there is none the less a lasting community of thought between the two spirits, a lasting debt from the younger to the elder. Indeed, we cannot say that at all points Shakspere outwent his guide. It is a curious reflection that they had probably one foible in common; for we know Montaigne's little weakness of desiring his family to be thought ancient, of suppressing the fact of its recent establishment by commerce; and we have evidence which seems to show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] despite rebuffs, the formal const.i.tution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On the other hand, there is nothing in Shakspere's work--the nature of the case indeed forbade it--to compare in democratic outspokenness with Montaigne's essay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]

that "the souls of emperors and cobblers are all cast in one same mould"

could not well be echoed in Elizabethan drama; and indeed we cannot well be sure that Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his fixed habit of taking kings and princes and generals and rich ones for his personages.

But then, on the other hand, we cannot be sure that this was anything more than a part of his deliberate life's work of producing for the English mult.i.tude what that mult.i.tude cared to see, and catching London with that bait of royalty which commonly attracted it. It remains a fine question whether his extravagant idealisation and justification of Henry V.--which, though it gives so little pause to some of our English critics, ent.i.tled M. Guizot to call him a mere John Bull in his ideas of international politics--it remains disputable whether this was exactly an expression of his own thought. It is notable that he never again strikes the note of blatant patriotism. And the poets of that time, further, seem to have had their tongues very much in their cheeks with regard to their Virgin Queen; so that we cannot be sure that Shakspere, paying her his fanciful compliment,[184] was any more sincere about it than Ben Jonson, who would do as much while privately accepting the grossest scandal concerning her.[185] It is certainly a remarkable fact that Shakspere abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry over her death, incurring reproof by his silence.[186]

However all that may have been, we find Shakspere, after his period of pessimism, viewing life in a spirit which could be expressed in terms of Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly shaped his latter years in accordance with the essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other man in Shakspere's theatrical group deliberately turning his back, as he did, on the many-coloured London life when he had means to enjoy it at leisure, and seeking to possess his own soul in Stratford-on-Avon, in the circle of a family which had already lived so long without him. But that retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense experience, is a main fact in Shakspere's life, and one of our main clues to his innermost character. Emerson, never quite delivered from Puritan prepossessions, avowed his perplexity over the fact "that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos--that he should not be wise for himself: it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure (!) and profane life, using his genius for the public amus.e.m.e.nt." If this were fundamentally so strange a thing, one might have supposed that the transcendentalist would therefore "as a stranger give it welcome."

Approaching it on another plane, one finds nothing specially perplexing in the matter. Shakspere's personality was an uncommon combination; but was not that what should have been looked for? And where, after all, is the evidence that he was "not wise for himself"?[187] Did he not make his fortune where most of his rivals failed? If he was "obscure," how otherwise could he have been less so? How could the bankrupt tradesman's son otherwise rise to fame? Should he have sought, at all costs, to become a lawyer, and rise perchance to the seat of Bacon, and the opportunity of eking out his stipend by bribes? If it be conceded that he must needs try literature, and such literature as a man could live by; and if it be further conceded that his plays, being so marvellous in their content, were well worth the writing, where enters the "profanity"

of having written them, or of having acted in them, "for the public amus.e.m.e.nt"? Even wise men seem to run special risks when they discourse on Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own anomaly.

It is indeed fair to say that Shakspere must have drunk a bitter cup in his life as an actor. It is true that that calling is apt to be more humiliating than another to a man's self-respect, if his judgment remain sane and sensitive. We have the expression of it all in the Sonnets:[188]

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, _Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear_, _Made old offences of affections new_."

It is impossible to put into fewer and fuller words the story, many a year long, of sordid compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn its own inner life into matter for the stage. But he who can read Shakspere might be expected to divine that it needed, among other things, even some such discipline as that to give his spirit its strange universality of outlook. And he who could esteem both Shakspere and Montaigne might have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of the final retirement, the dramatic caterer finally winning, out of his earnings, the peace and self-possession that the essayist had inherited without toil. He must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Montaigne's very words[189]: "My design is to pa.s.s quietly, and not laboriously, what remains to me of life; there is nothing for which I am minded to make a strain: not knowledge, of whatever great price it be." And when he at length took himself away to the quiet village of his birth, it could hardly be that he had not in mind those words of the essay[190] on SOLITUDE:

"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether ours, and wholly free, wherein we may h.o.a.rd up and establish our true liberty, the princ.i.p.al retreat and solitariness, wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long enough for others, live we the remainder of all life unto ourselves.... Shake we off these violent hold-fasts which elsewhere engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. The greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be his own. It is high time to shake off society, since we can bring nothing to it...."

A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and exhorts the soul to live aright:

"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that live to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed; without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men, And death once dead, there's no more dying then"--

an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, herein before cited.[192]

In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of Montaigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, as with a wondrous sunset, the play which one would fain believe the last of all. At the end, as at the beginning, we find the poet working on a pre-existing basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we find him picturing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal types of womanhood, who stand out with a fugitive radiance from the surroundings of mere humanity; but over all alike, in the TEMPEST, there is the fusing spell of philosophic reverie. Years before, in HAMLET, he had dramatically caught the force of Montaigne's frequent thought that daylight life might be taken as a nightmare, and the dream life as the real. It was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist above all men, even were it not pressed upon him by the essayist's reiterations:

"Those which have compared our life unto a dream, have happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When we dream, our soul liveth, worketh, and exerciseth all her faculties, even and as much as when it waketh.... We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so clear, yet can I never find my waking clear enough, or without dimness.... Why make we not a doubt whether our thinking and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some kind of sleeping?"[193]

"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination will forge me commodities and afford means and delights wherewith my mind is really tickled and essentially gladded.

How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical pa.s.sions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to forego it for a dream."[194]

" ... Our reasons do often antic.i.p.ate the effect and have the extension of their jurisdiction so infinite, that they judge and exercise themselves in inanity, and to a not being. Besides the flexibility of our invention, to frame reasons unto all manner of dreams; our imagination is likewise found easy to receive impressions from falsehood, by very frivolous appearances."[195]

Again and again does the essayist return to this note of mysticism, so distinct from the daylight practicality of his normal utterance. And it was surely with these musings in his mind that the poet makes Prospero p.r.o.nounce upon the phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed at his behest. We know, indeed, that the speech proceeds upon a reminiscence of four lines in the Earl of Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into his all-trans.m.u.ting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his subtler measure. The Earl's lines run:

"Let greatness of her gla.s.sy scepters vaunt; Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon broken; And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant; All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.

Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls, With furniture superfluously fair; Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls, Evanish all like vapours in the air."

The sonorities of the rhymed verse seem to have vibrated in the poet's brain amid the memories of the prose which had suggested to him so much; and the verse and prose alike are raised to an immortal movement in the great lines of Prospero:

"These our actors, As I foretold you, are all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff As dreams are made on_, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

In the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason, as some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his Utopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges the dialogue as to express his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will be remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of the villains of the piece, and Alonso, the wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of the ideal community to distract Alonso's troubled thoughts; Sebastian and Antonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, "Pr'ythee, no more, thou dost talk nothing to me." Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was meant to state Shakspere's prophetic derision for all communisms and socialisms and peace congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the principle of "Gott mit uns." And it may well have been that Shakspere, looking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that he humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in the mouth of a surly rascal--he has done as much elsewhere. But he was surely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no more Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than AS YOU LIKE IT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay, which was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted with some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man to repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban[196]

as the real "cannibal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his impression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET, Measure for Measure, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had reached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong, the sane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he could not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old tragedy of revenge which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he found didactically enough set down in the essay on Diversion:[197]

"Revenge is a sweet pleasing pa.s.sion, of a great and natural impression: I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that pa.s.sion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I diverted him to ambition."

And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the drama:--

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my n.o.bler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part; the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance...."

The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's society; even the cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] as a necessary member of it:--

"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices That profit us."

It is surely not unwarrantable to p.r.o.nounce, then, finally, that the poet who thus watchfully lit his action from the two sides of pa.s.sion and sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman, subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too, was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?

[1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.

[2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in the Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly Almost as much as from Montaignie; He has so modern and facile a vein, Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.

--Act iii. sc. 2.

[3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.

[4] Article in _Journal des Debats_, 7 November, 1846, reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, ed. 1879, p.

136.

[5] _Montaigne_ (Serie des _Grands Ecrivains Francais_), 1895, p. 105.

[6] _Moliere et Shakspere._

[7] _Shakspere and Cla.s.sical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.

[8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July, 1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).

[9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.

[10] Book I, Essay 33.

[11] _Advice_ in Florio.

[12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._

[13] B. III, Ch. 12.

[14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.

[15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.

[16] Book I, ch. 23.

[17] _Ibid._

[18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est: prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's phrase.