Chapter 8
Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne? What were really Montaigne's religious and philosophic opinions? We must consider this point also with more circumspection than has been shown by most of Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit initiated by the Catholic priests who denounced his heathenish use of the term "Fortune," and strengthened by various writers from Pascal to Emerson, is a hindrance to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the word "sceptic" has passed through two phases of significance, and may still have either. In the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a good deal of a "sceptic," because the main purport of the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE appears to be the discrediting of human reason all round, and the consequent shaking of all certainty. And this method strikes not only indirectly but directly at the current religious beliefs; for Montaigne indicates a lack of belief in immortality,[166] besides repeatedly ignoring the common faith where he would naturally be expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth and fortieth essays hereinbefore cited, and in his discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As is complained by Dean Church:[167] "His views, both of life and death, are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His profession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of showing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism, than the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ideals; for he indicates alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his sense of the folly of insisting on the whole body of dogma. When fanatical Protestants, uncritical of their own creed, affected to doubt the sincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, he was naturally piqued. But he was more deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when the few but keen freethinkers of the time treated the THEOLOGIA NATURALIS of Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For himself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, of the school of Cicero and Seneca; and as regards that side of his own thought he is not at all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally protested against all attempts to bring deity down to human conceptions, while himself doing that very thing, as every theist needs must.
Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the traditional deism of the pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, so abnormally alive to all impressions, that when he fully faced the darker sides of universal drama, with his reflective powers at work, he must utter a pessimism commensurate with the theme. This is part, if not the whole, of the answer to the question "Why did Shakspere write tragedies?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's, that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE), after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its tragedies mostly from others, it now took its comedies mostly from others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the new tragedies is partly a reflex of his own experience, but also in large part an expression of the philosophy to which he had been led by his reading, as well as by his life. For we must finally avow that the pervading thought in the tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the case. In OTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong--weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is struck in the lines:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods: They kill us for their sport."
And since there is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any decorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of reacting against Montaigne's "scepticism," as Herr Stedefeld supposes, he produced yet other tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the wronged alike exhibit less and not more of Christian faith than Hamlet,[172] and in which there is no hint of any such faith on the part of the dramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre persistence in the presentment of unrelieved evil. The utterly wicked Iago has as much of religion in his talk as anyone else in OTHELLO, using the phrases "Christian and heathen," "God bless the mark," "Heaven is my judge," "You are one of those that will not serve God, if the devil bid you," "the little godliness I have," "God's will," and so forth; the utterly wicked Edmund in LEAR, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's "sceptical" passage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions, gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand, declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] express his belief in "a most auspicious star." In the case of Montaigne, who goes on yet again to contradict himself in the APOLOGY itself, satirising afresh the habit of associating deity with all human concerns, we are driven to surmise an actual variation of opinion--the vivacious intelligence springing this way or that according as it is reacting against the atheists or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of course, is not a coherent philosopher; the way to systematic philosophic truth is a path too steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy";[176] and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset the system of that sober theologian as well as all others. Whether Shakspere, on the other hand, could or did detect all the inconsistencies of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which we are not entitled to more than a surmise; but we do find that on certain issues on which Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors, Shakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master doctrine that we should live "according to nature," is given to talking of "art" and "nature" in the ordinary manner, carrying the primitive commonplace indeed to the length of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the Cannibals,[177] speaking of "savages," he protests that
"They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath produced, whereas indeed they are those which ourselves have altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most lively and vigorous;"[178]
deciding with Plato that
"all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of the two first; the least and imperfect by this last."
And in the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing that
"Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and guides" the lower animals, "as if by the hand, to all the actions and commodities of their life," while, "as for us, she abandons us to hazard and fortune, and to seek by art the things necessary to our conservation,"
though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that "nature has universally embraced all her creatures," man as well as the rest, and to argue that man is as much a creature of nature as the rest--since even speech, "if not natural, is necessary"--he never seems to come within sight of the solution that art, on his own showing, is just nature in a new phase. But to that point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the WINTER'S TALE, one of the latest plays (? 1611), written about the time when we know him to have been reading or re-reading the essay on the Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant gillyflowers in her garden,
"For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature,"
the old king answers:
"Say there be: Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: This is an art Which does mend nature--change it rather; but The art itself is nature."[180]
It is an analysis, a criticism, a philosophic demonstration; and the subtle poet smilingly lets us see immediately that he had tried the argument on the fanatics of "nature," fair or other, and knew them impervious to it. "I'll not put," says Puritan Perdita, after demurely granting that "so it is"--
"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 constitution 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 multitude what that multitude 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, entitled 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 amusement." 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 amusement"? 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 pass 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 hoard up and establish our true liberty, the principal 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 passions 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 anticipate 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 pronounce 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-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his subtler measure. The Earl's lines run:
"Let greatness of her glassy 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."